Earth and other unlikely worlds

That's Entertainment

2012-02-06T17:04:00.002Z

Property War

2012-01-30T19:52:00.000Z

No doubt the new glass extension of the BBC's Broadcasting House at Portland Place is supposed to neatly frame All Souls Church, but walking up Regents Street this afternoon it struck me that it looked like nothing so much as a pseudopod of a huge amoeba poised to engulf the spire and strip it of its stony nutrients. Imagine, in a city like London or New York where space is at a premium, buildings warring with their neighbours in an attempt to expand their footprint. The borders between them as black and necrotic as the borders between neighbouring colonies of coral, an interzone of conference rooms and offices frozen in the act of morphing from one function to another. A struggle upwards in an attempt to shade out each other's solar panels. Mines and countermines in the foundations. Raids into enemy volumes by extensible corridors; cadres of ninja IT technicians running illicit cables through ducts to tap into the power systems and mainframes of the opposition. Sound systems screaming advertorial propaganda. Late stage capitalism at its most feral.

Don't

2012-01-27T17:42:00.000Z

Two lists of what I guess you could call anti-advice for aspiring (science-fiction) writers, one from Nick Mamatas, the other from Charlie Jane Anders at io9. I suggest you pay particular attention to #2, 5 and 10 in the first, and #3, 9 and 10 in the second.

Genre writers are often urged to show character through their actions. By what they do rather than by what they think and feel. Working on the new draft of Evening's Empires, I'm reminded all over again that it's what they choose not to do that's also important.

In The Mouth Of The Whale

2012-01-19T10:36:00.000Z

It's publication day of my new novel, and I've added a couple of pages to my web site, one featuring links to all twelve chapters I've made available, the other a brief piece on writing the novel.

There's other free stuff on the web site, by the way - stories and articles, and extracts from other novels.

Only Forward

2012-01-18T15:32:00.003Z

From a short article by John Naughton on how word-processing changed the way we write:

The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers "spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing".

Which strikes me as a pretty accurate description of the problems many people have when they try to write their first novel. Of course, established authors aren't immune from these sins, but in my limited experience of teaching creative writing one of the main reasons first drafts tend founder and stall is that the author spends weeks and months drafting and redrafting the first chapter, trying to get it absolutely right before moving on to the next. My advice is to keep going. Revise the first draft when you have a complete first draft. And when you have assembled the complete skeleton of the story, you will almost certainly find that your precious first chapter contains passages that are no longer relevant. In fact, the entire first chapter might usefully be omitted. (Many authors, confronted with this unpalatable fact, can't quite bring themselves to kill their darling, which is why far too many novels have superfluous scene-setting prologues. In italc.)

Pulgasari

2012-01-17T15:22:00.004Z

Across the Thames to Borough High Street and the Roxy Bar and Screen for a showing of North Korean monster movie Pulgasari. It's by no means a good film, but it's important and interesting because it's a rare glimpse into the mindset of the famously secretive Last True Communist State™, and because one of its directors, Shin Sang-ok, was kidnapped from South Korea on the orders of Kim Jong-il, then heir presumptive of supreme leader Kim Il-sung, in 1978.

The story is as simple as a fairytale, a kind of amalgam of Godzilla, Seven Samurai and Sparticus, filmed in the style of lowest-common-denominator Hong Kong Chop Socky movies. The land is oppressed by decadent rulers who confiscate the peasants' tools and cooking bowls so that they can be melted down and turned into weapons. The eldest son of a blacksmith plans to join the rebels; when his father refuses to cooperate with the authorities and is arrested, the son attempts to intervene and is likewise thrown in jail. The dying father creates a doll, Pulgasari, out of rice grains and infuses it with his dying breath; later it comes to life when a drop of his daughter's blood touches it, and starts to eat iron, and starts to grow. Pulgasari rescues the blacksmith's son from execution, the son leads a revolution that, aided by the now gigantic monster, overthrows the king and his armies. But the victorious peasants must now feed the ever-hungry Pulgasari with every scrap of metal they possess; they're no better off than before. Only when the blacksmith's daughter sacrifices herself to the monster's appetite is its rampage finally ended.

Although the monster-in-a-suit was masterminded by Japan's Toho studios (Pulgasari is played by the same actor who played Godzilla in the leaping lizard's 1980s incarnations) some of the special effects are crude, to western eyes the acting is melodramatically overwrought, concentrating on big, simple emotional gestures, and the cutting is either erratically abrupt or the print I saw has been sliced down from a much longer film. Yet Pulgasari also possesses a kind of innocent charm, with the best beard-stroking villains I've seen in a long while, some terrifically detailed sets for the monster to wreck, and the kind of epic battlescenes that are possible only when the director has an entire army at his disposal and doesn't seem to have much care for the safety of his extras. But despite the simplicity of its story and message - war is a Bad Thing, mmkaay? - Pulgasari is also a weirdly ambiguous film. Perhaps it is no more than crude propaganda intended to show how the warmongering West was oppressing its population and threatening the entire world with endless war involving horrific superweapons - like Godzilla, Pulgasari is clearly a metaphor for the atomic bomb. If so, the militarised state of North Korea is just as guilty, and scenes of starving peasants butchering a horse for real and eating tree bark echo actual famines suffered by its population. Did the film's state producers fail to see these parallels, or did they know exactly what they were doing but thought that the film's audience would accept the propaganda (if that's what it is) at face value? Or did its kidnapped director manage to pull off a sly coup de theatre mocking his captors? Impossible to tell.

Later, waiting for the bus outside London Bridge Station, with the Shard leaning into the winter night. What would alien eyes make of that? A monument to Western ambition and power, or a signifier of the failed dreams of the never-ending rise in profit touted by the propagandists of late-stage capitalism?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 12

2012-01-16T12:49:00.001Z

You can now read chapter 12 of In The Mouth of the Whale at the web site. Or begin at the beginning.

It brings us up to the end of the first part of the novel, and will be the last I'll post for a while. Meanwhile, I have another novel to finish, and I'm getting to grips with the requirements for publishing ebooks on platforms other than Kindle . . .

In other news, I'll be at the SFX Weekender at the beginning of next month, and the British National SF Convention, Eastercon, at, er, Easter.

Listening to: 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' Richard and Linda Thompson
Reading: Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog
Writing: Revising a short story

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 11

2012-01-13T13:42:00.003Z

Chapter 11 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now up on the web site. Chapter 1 is over here. And you can now preorder the Kindle edition for the price of a paperback (also available for preorder on iTunes).

Currently listening to: 'Down on Penny's Farm' The Bently Boys
Currently reading: Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway
Currently writing: see Red Ink

Red Ink

2012-01-11T16:56:00.001Z

As publication of In The Mouth Of The Whale inches closer, I'm working on what I hope is the penultimate draft of the next novel, Evening's Empires. My first short stories and my first novel were composed entirely on a typewriter; while I confess to a certain minor nostalgia for the only forward method typewriters imposed on you, I don't miss interleaving bond, carbon and bank (onionskin) papers, necessary to get a duplicate copy in a time when photocopies were scarce and expensive, and I was never a big fan of Tipp-ex and other correction fluids, or retyping a page if it contained more than three errors in it. I was an early adopter of word-processing and love its fluidity of composition, but I still maintain one tradition from the old keys-on-ink-ribbon-on-paper days: I still print out at least one draft of whatever I'm working on, and go over it with a red pen in hand.

Which is what I'm doing right now. Because I have the idea, never tested, that it is easier to spot goofs on the printed page rather than on the screen, I prefer to annotate hard copy than make electronic notes. (Has anyone ever done a serious study of this? If not, surely it wouldn't be too hard to set up a randomised experiment where, say, half the test subjects proof-read a text on screen and the other half proof-read it on paper, and then swapped from screen to paper and vice versa and corrected another text.) Some of my corrections are of punctuation and spelling; others highlight instances of repetition, correct factual errors, or change the order of a sentence to eliminate ambiguity. But the most important changes are the notes to myself about glitches in plot, action, and character. Some are terse; others spill all the way down the page, or are linked by looping arrows to paragraphs at the top or bottom of the page; really serious second thoughts are continued on the blank side of the page, with the command OVER written in the margin and underscored two or three times so I don't miss the annotations when I start over, and begin to make changes on screen. At this point, I'm the first person to read through the entire novel; I realise that I've become kin to the kind of creature who annotates library books with scornful exclamation marks and sarcastic underlinings.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 10

2012-01-09T15:09:00.003Z

Chapter 10 of In The Mouth Of The Whale has been posted on the web site. If you want to start from the beginning, it's this way.

In other news, my short story 'Gene Wars' is featured in the January edition of Lightspeed magazine. [Edit: you can now read the story for free. And there's a brief interview with me, too, conducted by Andrew Liptak.]

Currently listening to: 'I Don't Get it', Cowboy Junkies
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
Currently writing: Hacking away the excess from the ante-penultimate draft of Evening's Empires.

Interstellar Travel

2012-01-07T15:48:00.002Z

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail
darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

Discovering this fragment of D.H. Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death' in Grayson Perry's The Tomb Of The Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum reminded me of the importance of the metaphorical power of science fiction. Something so often forgotten, these days, when too often it's mistaken for a literal report on the future.

The Excitement Of The Found Image

2012-01-06T15:55:00.000Z

Why even hard science fiction shouldn't be considered to be in any way a facsimile of the scientific method:
In just three sentences, M. John Harrison nails what science fiction is really all about.

Just Received

2012-01-06T12:23:00.000Z

The author's copies of In the Mouth of The Whale. Always strange and exciting to hold in your hands proof that something that started out in your head has become a mass-produced object, out there in the world. I like the cover even more now I realise that there's an image on the back, too. Sidonie Beresford-Browne, who also did the covers for The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, has done a great job.

Fragment From A Work In Progress

2012-01-05T15:31:00.000Z

‘Let me tell you about a dream I had when I was about your age. I dreamed that I had entered a great white city, and I knew, in the dream, that I had also travelled into the future, although I cannot tell you how I knew. Perhaps because such cities were sometimes represented in popular fiction about the future, although the one into which I walked in my dream was much more detailed than any picture of imaginary cities. There were many tall buildings, all built of white stone and fretted with row upon row of windows. Some cylindrical and buttressed with fins, like the dreams of the first spaceships before the first spaceships were built. Some narrow rectangles. Some square in profile. Some tapering to points. Clad in differently textured and decorated stone, but all white in the bland sunlight. They stood in clusters and at their feet were smaller buildings. All again built of white stone. Elevated roadways and monorail lines ran past the buildings or looped around them at different levels. There were open spaces, but they contained only white gravel and stone fountains, and statues of people in heroic and noble poses. No trees, no growing things of any kind, and no decoration or signs. In the time when I lived, cities were full of signs advertising all kinds of goods and services. Here, the buildings were blank canvases and the everyday life of the city was unreadable.

'In some dreams, you are a bodiless viewpoint able to transition from one place to another. People in the dream talk with you as if you were one of them, but you have no sense of your body. You are an observer. That was not the case in this dream. I was aware of every footstep, and the people who inhabited the city looked at me as I passed. Perhaps because I was dressed as I would be dressed in waking life, which to them must have seemed as strange and antique as a man in a suit of armour walking up Broadway. The citizens of the city were men and women who were each different and each similar, in the way of members of the same family look alike. They had brown skin and black hair cut short in various styles, and wore long shirts over loose trousers in combinations of pastel colours. There were no children. In my day birds nested on ledges of buildings as if on cliffs, and people kept certain kinds of animals as pets. There were no animals that I could see. Only adults of varying ages. There were many of them, but the walkways and monorail trains were not crowded because the city was so large.

‘I wandered a long time, but did not dare to enter any building. At last, with shadows engulfing the feet of the tall buildings and reddened sunlight burning on their western faces, at the foot of a huge statue of a bare-breasted woman holding up a strand of DNA to the blank dish of her face (none of the statues had features), one of the inhabitants came up to me, and asked me if I was a traveller. I told him that I was dreaming. Often we do not know in dreams that we are dreaming, but I knew. I also told him that I believed that I was dreaming about the future. He looked at me quizzically, and said that although this was his present, it was not necessarily my future. He said that I might reach it, but there were other paths I might take.’

'Satisfied' - Tom Waits

2011-12-30T15:18:00.001Z

'Video Games' - Lana Del Rey

2011-12-30T13:58:00.000Z

'Field Song' - William Elliot Whitmore

2011-12-30T13:16:00.000Z

'The Way It Goes' - Gillian Welch

2011-12-30T12:40:00.002Z

'Quail and Dumplings' - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

2011-12-30T10:06:00.000Z

That Was The Year That Was

2011-12-29T20:13:00.002Z

In 2011 I finished one novel, In The Mouth of The Whale, and got a good chunk of writing done on the next, Evening's Empires. I published a novella, 'The Choice', in Asimov's SF and wrote two short stories. One, 'Bruce Springsteen', appeared in the January 2012 edition of Asimov's; the other is for the second volume of Stephen Jones' Zombie Apocalypse series, out sometime in 2012 I believe. Five novels were reissued as ebooks by Gollancz (they went live in January, a bit later than planned, so I'm counting them here). One, Four Hundred Billion Stars, my first, was written on a typewriter. The others are Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland. Like many genre authors, I have a big back catalogue of stories, and this year I experimented with releasing a few of them as ebooks. First up was a novella, City of the Dead, followed by the reissue of a short-story collection, Little Machines, previously available only as a limited edition hardback, and then a collection of five stories sharing the same future history, Stories From the Quiet War. Conclusions so far: it's better for authors to release stories in small, cheap collections or as singletons, rather than book-length collections. As usual, the feeling that I should write more (the usual freelancer terror of not being productive enough) is counterbalanced by the conviction that I must write better.

I didn't read much new fiction this year - too busy writing it. discovery of the year was Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers, a wonderfully deadpan black comedy set in Goldrush California. I thought the first half of China Mieville's Embassytown, an SF fable about the cage of language, was one of the strongest and strangest depictions of the alien I've read for some time. In Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie the past is an alien planet; the description of the hunting and capture of a Komodo dragon is as densely weird as any interplanetary expedition. Christopher Priest's The Islanders revisits the world of his Dream Archipelago, and within its tour guide format the fragments of several stories twine and merge: one I need to reread. I'm a big fan of Don DeLillo, so snapped up The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories as soon as it came out; from the tropical inertia of 'Creation' to the desperate obsession of 'The Starveling', DeLillo's Martian gaze perfectly captures fragments of human foolishness in the amber of recent history.

In non-fiction, James Gleick's The Information is a marvellous and lucid history of how we preserve and use the stuff we know, and how if shapes our lives. Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality is an equally lucid exploration of the current theories of multiverses. Gordon Matthews' The Ghetto at the Center of the World may be confined to a single building in Hong Kong, but his stories of a microcosm of globalisation reflect the huge currents in capitalism that affect every part of the world. Just over a hundred years ago, Amundsen's expedition reached the south pole; geologist Edmund Stump's The Roof at the Bottom of the World weaves personal stories of rockhunting in Antarctica with a history of Antarctic exploration, and is packed with jaw-dropping photographs of the continent's austere beauty. There are more great photographs in Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, a memorial of the architecture of the Communist equivalent of the Gernsback continuum, and a way of life and thought now all but extinct, here in the twenty-first century.

God's Own Christmas Ornament

2011-12-24T11:01:00.001Z

In what is one of the best images ever taken by the Cassini spacecraft, Titan and Dione hang in front of Saturn's rings. Like Earth, Saturn has seasons caused by the tilt in its axis. It's presently spring, in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The sun is behind and above the viewpoint, and the shadows of the rings are cast across the southern hemisphere.

The image is in true colour, by the way, so it is exactly what you would see if you were floating in the observation cupola of a clipper outward bound from Rhea en route to Jupiter.

Night Movies

2011-12-22T20:57:00.008Z

On the night of the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice, nine of my favourite films in which the story takes place over a single night. What did I miss?

The Thing 1982 dir John Carpenter
The crew of an isolated Antarctic base are infiltrated by a shape-changing alien. Unable to trust each other, they're picked off one by one as they try to stop the alien escaping. Yes, I know it begins in daylight, but the action really starts, with eye-popping SFX by Rob Bottin, as the stormy Antarctic night falls.
Best moment: Touched by a hot needle, self-aware alien blood leaps out of a petri dish.

Into The Night 1985 dir. John Landis
Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) has a dull job, an unfaithful wife, and can't sleep. When he accidently saves Diana (Michelle Pfieffer) from Iranian thugs in an LAX parking structure, he becomes embroiled in a plot involving smuggled jewels. David Bowie appears as a private detective who mistakes Ed for a veteran player.
Best moment: Stunned by narcolepsy, Ed watches an entire Cal Worthington commercial.

Night On Earth 1991 dir Jim Jarmusch
One night, five cities, five cab drivers and their fares, and a Tom Waits' soundtrack.
Best moment: Cabbie Corky (Winona Ryder) turns down casting director Gena Rowlands' offer of a part in a movie. She'd rather be a mechanic.

The Warriors 1979 dir Walter Hill
Framed for a murder that threatens to trigger gang warfare, a small but resourceful gang, the Warriors, must cross hostile territories in New York to reach a midnight summit, their only chance to prove their innocence. A great action film from great action film director Hill, set in tough old New York. With a story loosely based on Xenophon's 'Anabasis'.
Best moment: Warrior's leader Swan (Michael Beck) and gang-girl Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) meet cute.

Collateral 2004 dir. Michael Mann
After cab driver Max (Jamie Fox) drops off lawyer Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) he picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a suave businessman who turns out to be a suave hitman. As the paths of his two fares intersect, Max has to work out how to save himself and the last victim on Vincent's little list.
Best moment: A coyote crosses the path of Max's cab, on an LA street turned into a ghost of itself by halogen streetlights.

Die Hard 1988 dir. John McTierman
When New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) turns up at his wife's office Christmas party, he becomes the only man who can stop a terrorist plot. You know the rest. There's a famous scriptwriting class that uses Casablanca as an exemplar. If you want to write a script without a superfluous scene or line, study Jeb Stuart and Stephen E de Souza's adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel.
Best thing in the movie: Bruce's vest.

Night of the Living Dead 1968 dir George Romero
A mixed bunch of people hide out from flesh-eating zombies in a remote farmhouse. Things don't go too well. Shot on a shoestring budget, it set the template for zombie and spam-in-a-cabin horror films every since. Has one of the bleakest endings of any film.
Best moment: Involves a little girl, her father, her mother, and a basement.

After Hours 1985 dir. Martin Scorsese.
Word-processing drone Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is plunged into a nocturnal Kafkaesque nightmare when he ventures into Manhattan's Soho to meet a girl he picked up in a coffee shop.
Best moment: Paul is turned into a living statue, to hide him from a vengeful mob.

It's A Wonderful Life 1946 dir. Frank Capra
On the worst night in the life of small town businessman George Bailey (James Stewart), apprentice angel Clarence (Henry Travers) demonstrates the worth of a life he thinks a claustrophobic dead end by showing what things would be like if he'd never been born. Key moments in his life are shown in flashback, so I think it counts. And the night in question is Christams Eve, so hey. In his novel, Suspects, film critic David Thomson sets It's A Wonderful Life at the root of American noir. He has a point.
Best moment: Cornered by cops on the bridge where Clarence forestalled his suicide attempt, a humbled George Bailey asks for his life back. And snow starts falling around him like a blessing.

The Dead Hand Of The Past

2011-12-21T15:17:00.000Z

Outside the office window, a funeral cortege clip-clops past, headed by a carriage drawn by two black horses with black plumes affixed to their heads, drawing an open carriage in which the coffin lies inside a glass bier. Like the last resting place of Snow White. As William Faulkner once said, the past isn't dead; it isn't even past. Always useful for a science-fiction writer to be reminded of that.

Working on a short story. After finishing a draft, I realised that it had been so laborious because it started in the wrong place. Which is why it was mostly back-story instead of narrative. You'd think, after writing some eighty-odd short stories I'd know by now where one wanted to begin.

Lauren Beukes has assembled a reading gift guide from the recommendations of many of her interesting friends. I was very pleased to be able to recommend this wonderful collection of photographs. More here, and here.

It may be cheeky of me to recommend one of my own books, but why not try this e-book collection, at a suitably cheeky price?

A Haunting We Will Go

2011-12-17T18:22:00.000Z

So I met up with indefatigable editor Stephen Jones and several other local bookish characters for pre-Christmas drinks, and he pressed into my hand a volume of one of his latest books, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, an anthology of new and reprinted ghost stories. It features numerous luminaries of the horror field, including Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Michael Marshal Smith, Lisa Tuttle, and also includes a rewritten version of one of my early short stories, 'Inheritance' - my ninth published story, in fact, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1988. I'm best known for my science fiction, but I've been a fan of horror stories from way back, turned on by Universal and Hammer films, the Mayflower horror anthologies, the Pan Books of Horror Stories, and the stories of M.R. James. On Christmas Eve in 1968, while the rest of the family were at Midnight Mass, I was frightened half to death by Jonathan Miller's famous TV adaptation of James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad'. Lonely beaches never seemed the same afterwards. And now one of my stories is between the same covers as one of the master's, 'A Warning to the Curious'. How cool.

Also cool - my novella, 'The Choice' has been selected by Rich Horton for his Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 Edition. Table of contents here.

Don't Call Me Sherly

2011-12-16T10:21:00.003Z

Long ago, during a class that introduced me and a bunch of my 11-year-old peers to the school library (where I soon discovered a complete set of H.G. Wells' work, but that's another story), our English teacher asked a question: 'Where does Sherlock Holmes live?' My hand wasn't the only one to shoot up, and I forget who gave the correct answer. But I do remember that as far as our teacher was concerned it was the wrong answer. 'You see, boys, Sherlock Holmes was never alive. So he could not have lived anywhere.' I've never forgiven him for trying to turn the treasure house of the library into a mausoleum.

He picked on Sherlock Holmes because Holmes is one of the most famous fictional characters in fiction, who had one of the most famous addresses in literature: one of us was bound to know the answer (you know it, of course). Sherlock Holmes is so famous that you don't have to have read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories, or to have seen any of the numerous films in which Holmes has appeared (more than any other fictional character), to know several singular facts about him. I first encountered him in an anthology of the original stories, in a limp-covered volume dating from the 1920s; I've just encountered him again in a preview of his latest film incarnation, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Oh dear.

It's the sequel to director Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes film, which turned Holmes into an action hero in a lightly steam-punked Victorian London, and featured rapid-fire comic banter between Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and Watson (Jude Law) and elaborate bullet- and explosion-ridden set pieces punctuated by sequences of slow motion, time-slicing, and other techniques Ritchie previously deployed on his gangster films. I thought it was rather good fun. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is more of the same, but ups the stakes by introducing Holmes' nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), whose fiendish plans soon puts a crimp in Doctor Watson's honeymoon.

The plot is very loosely based on 'The Final Problem', the story in which Conan Doyle tried to kill off his most famous creation. It kicks off with an explosion in Strasbourg and an encounter between Holmes, Irene Adler, the femme fatale who helped him in his previous adventure, and a fistful of goons, and barely pauses for breath in a headlong dash that involves gypsies, anarchists, a chase across Europe, and diplomatic skulduggery. It's not a bad film, as noisy spectacles go. Its varied locations are packed with period detail, Downey turns in another fine comic performance, Law's Watson is an able foil to Holmes' quick-fire eccentricities, and the postmortem reveals of how the great detective foresaw and confounded the knavish tricks of his enemies are as clever as in the first film.

But it isn't as good as its predecessor, doesn't add anything new to the canon, and it doesn't quite know what to do with most of the supporting characters. Although Mycroft Holmes is drolly played by Stephen Fry, the script doesn't do much to show that he's Holmes' smarter, older brother, except to call him Sherly. I would have liked to have seen more of Simza Heron (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the original Dragon Tattoo trilogy), the gypsy whose brother has been caught up in Moriarty's plans. Rapace's performance is lit by smouldering intelligence, but like the other women in the film she takes second place to the bromance between Holmes and Watson, whose sparring banter is sharp and lively at its best, and as camp as a pantomine dame at its worst (the film's humour is laid on with a broad brush: the only thing funnier than a man in a dress is a middle-aged man clad only in his dignity).

The film's big problem is that in hindsight, once the dazzle and noise of the action sequences has died down, the logic of its narrative falls apart. To be fair, it's a problem common to most action films, and to quite a few genre novels, too (writers: if you rely on big set pieces to keep the narrative flowing, you're in trouble - especially if your biggest and noisiest set piece takes place in the middle of the story rather than towards the end). More fatally, for this particular action film, the menace and significance of its villain diminishes as the film progresses, and Moriarty's fiendish plan is the stuff of a thousand action movies in which the villain promotes war for fun and/or profit - Mission Impossible IV uses the same old tired trope. Here's a bit of useful advice for budding evil masterminds: if your brilliant scheme involves starting a war somewhere, it probably isn't that brilliant, and will inevitably be thwarted at the last moment. Throw a couple of henchmen in the shark pool, relax with a martini salted with orphans' tears, and think of something else.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 9

2011-12-12T15:33:00.000Z

Chapter 9 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available on the web site. Haven't started yet? Here's Chapter 1.

This is the last chapter I'll post this side of the New Year. I'll put up three more early in January, taking us to the end of the first part of the novel.

Currently listening to: 'Don't Grieve After Me', Ernest Phelps
Currently reading: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Currently writing: a short story, very slowly

Through The Past, Darkly

2011-12-11T18:26:00.002Z

When it grows dark, as it does early in the afternoon, now, the details of the slice of London visible through the window of my office diminish to the spur of a cul-de-sac and a shadowy rise of land flecked with lights, and I'm reminded of looking out of the window of the attic bedroom I once shared with my brother. When I was a teenager and it became too noisy, downstairs, I would retreat to the attic and work on some piece of tyro fiction (all long lost, like the cottage), pecking at a typewriter perched on a scrap of wood laid across my knees, my shins burning in front of the one-bar electric fire, my fingers freezing.

There wasn't a house directly opposite, as there is now, but there was a warehouse looming at the far left-hand edge of the gardens shared by the four cottages of which ours was the third, and there was a railway beyond, as there is here, although the railway of the lost past was not in a cutting but was somewhat elevated, a branch-line station closed just a few years before. And then the breast of the steep slope up towards Selsley village, whose lights twinkled in the night just as the lights of Highgate twinkle now, just a handful, mostly hidden by winter-bare trees.

I finished a draft of the next novel a couple of weeks ago and will return to it at the beginning of the New Year, knowing at last the shape its narrative makes from beginning to end. I was thinking about a couple of short stories - the one I should write, the one that wants to be written right away - when the past ambushed me. I've been living here ten years, and it has only just occurred to me how familiar the view is, on a winter's night.

Like In the Mouth of the Whale, the new novel shares the same future history of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and is set some 1500 years after the events in those two novels. But while In the Mouth of the Whale is set in the atmosphere of a gas giant and in an archipelago of worldlets orbiting Fomalhaut, the new novel starts some fifty years later, in the asteroid belt of the Solar System. And although its story riffs off an event foreshadowed at the end of In the Mouth of the Whale, you don't need to have read one to enjoy the other, much as you don't need to have read the first two novels to enjoy In the Mouth of the Whale. It's called Evening's Empires, by the way. Among other things, it's about the persistence of the past.

In The Mouth Of The Whale - Chapter 8

2011-12-09T14:31:00.000Z

You can now read Chapter 8 of my forthcoming novel In The Mouth Of The Whale, over at the blog. Or you can start from the beginning.

Currently listening to: James McMurtry, 'See The Elephant'
Currently reading: Ghetto at the Center of the World, Gordon Mathews
Currently writing: I'm taking a short break...

More Ebookery - Special Promotional Prices

2011-12-07T09:07:00.000Z

I'm pleased to announce that I have published a new e-book. Stories From The Quiet War is a collection of five 'Quiet War' stories, including a previously unpublished novella, available only as an e-publication at the special price of just £0.86, or $1.34. I've also lowered the price of my short story collection, Little Machines, to just £1.71, or $2.67. Prices are good until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale. The cover of Stories From The Quiet War is, like those of my other two e-books, by the multi-talented Michael Marshall Smith.

Introduction To Stories From The Quiet War

2011-12-06T09:39:00.001Z

One of the stories collected [in Stories From The Quiet War], ‘Second Skin’, was the first short story I wrote in what would become the Quiet War sequence. Written way back in 1996 and published a year later, it contains several of the signature tropes of the sequence – the setting on an obscure little moon of one of the outer planets in the aftermath of a war between Earth and outer system colonists, vacuum organisms, the pursuit of the gene wizard Avernus, weaponised biotech, huge construction projects built by robots, and so on.

In the stories, the war was pretty conventional, triggered by a failed attempt by colonists to free themselves from the control of powerful interests on Earth. The novels reworked that history, turning the ancestors of the inhabitants of the outer system into refugees whose growing ambitions to spread out through the Solar System and push human evolution forward threatened a fragile peace between themselves and the political powers on Earth. But the novels shared with the short stories my interest in how the large movements of history affect the lives of those caught up in them (and vice versa), and my fascination with the fantastically varied landscapes of the moons of the outer planets. That fascination was first sparked by the images captured by Pioneer 11 and the two Viking spacecraft as they sped through the systems of the outer planets. Here were sulphur volcanoes, icy landscapes cratered by ancient bombardments, a moon with bright and dark hemispheres, a moon whose jigsaw surface might hide a vast ocean of liquid water, shepherd moons embedded within a vast ring system, and so on, and so on. The kind of exoticism that science-fiction writers traditionally mapped on to planets of far stars, right on our doorstep. The Galileo and Cassini-Huygens spacecraft sharpened those images and revealed fresh wonders – the geysers of little Enceladus, the rivers and lakes of Titan. Here were real places, named, mapped in detail. All I had to do was insert figures in those landscapes. But how did they live there? How did living there affect them? What were their dreams, their ambitions?

I wrote nine ‘Quiet War’ stories over a period of about ten years, extending the history of the war, and exploring various locations on and inside the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually took the plunge and wrote a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.The first was about the causes of the war and the long build-up to final act of violence; the second was about the consequences of the war for both victors and vanquished. Gardens of the Sun, set like the stories in the aftermath of the war, borrowed from several of them heavily modified settings and characters. The four stories republished here weren’t reworked into Gardens of the Sun, but the previously unpublished story, ‘Karyl’s War’, is a modification of an unused opening sequence of the novel and, like the novel, it contains rewritten passages from an earlier story (‘The Passenger’). It was intended to give a new perspective on the quick and violent conclusion to the long game of the Quiet War, but in the end I didn’t use it because I decided that I didn’t need to introduce a new character; the five main characters of The Quiet War were perfectly able to carry the various strands of the narrative forward. The Quiet War sequence has now been extended 1500 years into its future. A new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, is a self-contained story set at the edge of the dust ring around the star Fomalhaut, where one of the characters from The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun arrives in the middle of a war over control of the star’s single gas giant planet. There’s a big dumb object floating in atmosphere of that gas giant, probing for signs of life. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of an ancient cult. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution, and an exploration of the costs of longevity . . .

‘Second Skin’ and the other stories collected here are where all this began. The first steps on a long exploration of strange worlds, and the people who live there.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 7

2011-12-05T15:10:00.003Z

So I've now posted Chapter 7 of In The Mouth Of The Whale. We're a little under one fifth of the way through the novel. If you want to start from the beginning, Chapter 1 is over here. In other news, I'm pleased to say that my story 'The Choice' has been selected by Allan Kaster for Audiotext's The Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 4 and by Gardner Dozois for his The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.

Currently listening to: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 'I Call Upon The Author To Explain'
Currently reading: Edmund Stump's The Roof At The Bottom Of The World
Currently writing: an introduction to Stories From The Quiet War

Ebookery

2011-12-04T14:01:00.000Z

I'm collating a collection of 'Quiet War' stories for publication as an ebook. Titles will include 'Making History', 'Incomers', 'Second Skin', 'Reef' and 'Karyl's War'. The first four are reprints; the fifth is the alternate beginning of Gardens of the Sun previously trailed here, rewritten to form a self-contained novella. So, five stories, more than 70,000 words, price just £0.86, or $0.99 until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale.

The cover, by the way, is by Michael Marshall Smith.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 6

2011-12-02T16:40:00.000Z

Chapter 6 of In The Mouth Of The Whale now up at the web site, for your reading pleasure. If you haven't started yet, Chapter 1 is this way.

Currently listening to: Johnny Cash, 'Hard Times (Come Again No More)'
Currently reading: Karin Fossum's Broken
Currently Writing: Notes for short stories

Startling Stories of Super Science

2011-11-29T15:34:00.000Z

The scientist's beautiful daughter. The crackpot inventor (see also: Here's one I made earlier). Science mostly proceeds by saltatory leaps (see also: Evolution). It came to me in a dream. It was like a bolt of lightning (see also: I work best when my life is in danger). We scientists are above your petty emotions. There's nothing algebra can't prove. Young scientists are always right; old scientists are almost always wrong (see also: What did Einstein ever do for us?). Argument by analogy. Argument by syllogistic fallacy. Argument in the pub (see also: Repeat what you just said). You can go directly from hypothesis to prototype. Scientists are in it for the money. Some ideas will be discovered only once in human history (see also: Mine! All mine!). Only my unique skills will make this experiment work (see also: magic). Important ideas are always accepted straight away. The importance of an hypothesis is inversely proportional to the number of experiments needed to test it. A car battery, a glass tube and the guts of an old radio: we're good to go. The element or biological derivative that's key to the existence of a star-spanning Empire is invariably found on just one planet (see also: unique chemical elements). Genes are basically Lego. Genetic mutation is always expressed via morphological change. The aliens did it.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 5

2011-11-28T16:46:00.000Z

Chapter 5 of In The Mouth Of The Whale is now up on the web site. If you want to start from the beginning, here's the link to Chapter 1.

In other news, my novelette 'The Choice' will appear in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6. He's posted the table of contents on his blog; it includes stories by Stephen Baxter, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Geoff Ryman, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . . Looking forward to reading all of it.

Currently listening to: The Handsome Family, 'Flapping Your Broken Wings'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders
Currently writing: The epilogue to the next novel; a story for a new project.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 4

2011-11-25T14:54:00.003Z

I've just posted Chapter 4 of my forthcoming novel to the web site If you're late to the game,why not catch up with Chapters 1, 2 and 3 first? Special bonus: a podcast of my short story 'Little Lost Robot.'

Currently listening to: Leon Redbone's 'Mr. Jelly Roll Baker'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders.
Currently writing: the long epilogue of the next novel.

Hugo

2011-11-24T20:32:00.000Z

The conjunction of 'family-friendly' and '3-D' is not auspicious, even if the film in question is directed by Martin Scorsese. But from the first shot, a kind of reverse of the famous flying scene in Peter Pan, with the viewpoint swooping over the crowded and crooked roofs of a snowy, early 1930s Paris, ducking under the eaves of the arched roof of a train terminus, and closing in on the eye of a boy peering through a chink in a clock face at the bustling life from which he, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, is excluded, Hugo establishes itself as a triumphant and lovingly crafted work imbued with Scorsese's passion for film and film history.

The boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), is an orphan. After his clockmaker father (Jude Law) died in a fire, Hugo fell into the care of his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), and after his uncle disappeared he continued the work of maintaining the many clocks in the station. He lives in the wainscot world of the station's clock towers and hidden passages, snatching food from stalls and shops because he can't cash his uncle's salary cheques, avoiding the attention of the station's inspector, played by Sasha Baron Cohen as if Peter Cook was impersonating the child-snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Hugo's only link with his dead father is a complex automaton found in disrepair in a museum storeroom. Hugo has been stealing the cogs and ratchets he needs to bring the automaton back to life from the station's toy shop; the irascible owner, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), catches him red-handed and confiscates his precious notebook containing vital sketches and plans, and the clockwork of the plot is set in motion.

Hugo enlists the help of Papa George's goddaughter, Isabelle (Cloe Grace Moretz) to retrieve the notebook; Isabelle is more than willing because she wants a real-life version of the adventures in the books she loves. When he discovers that she wears around her neck the heart-shaped key that's necessary to make the automaton work, Hugo is finally able to set the machine in motion. It draws a picture of an iconic moment in an old film Hugo's father described to him, and the pair become detectives into the life of Papa Georges. And it's here, as they delve into cinema history, that the film really comes to life. Moments from the great silent films spin around them; a film historian recalls a visit to the studio of a pioneering film maker, whose methods and techniques are recreated in loving detail (with a entirely apt cameo by Scorsese). The film maker is Papa Georges, of course, who has renounced his past after he was forced to sell his celluloid archive to a chemical firm, which melted them down to make moulded heels for women's shoes; the two children conspire to bring about his return to the public eye, a task that's complicated, as you might expect (but not exactly as you might expect) by the attentions of the station's inspector.

Adapted from Brian Selznick's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it's the kind of old-fashioned tale in which clues are found in libraries, the mission is not to save the world but to bring the past back to life, and the only villain is time. Its CGI and 3-D effects serve the story and contribute to the intricately furnished station set rather than punctuate the narrative with crude thrusts of shock and awe. There's plenty of steam, there are dizzy plunges and pursuits through the cogs and escarpments of huge clocks, and there's also the automaton. Does Hugo's fantastical embroidery of a real-life story (because the story of the film pioneer who disappeared, and (like many of his 'lost' films) was found again, is true) contain enough steampunk flourishes to win it a Hugo?

Lynn Margulis

2011-11-23T14:19:00.000Z

Before I became a full-time writer, I worked as a scientist and university lecturer. Most of my research investigated the symbiotic relationships between animals and single-celled algae: how the sizes of populations of algae within animal cells were regulated, movement of photosynthetically-fixed carbon from algae to host animal, movement of ammonium and amino acids from host animal to algae, and so on. My chief research organism was green hydra, a common freshwater polyp that conveniently reproduces asexually by budding off new animals, so that uniform cloned populations can be grown in the laboratory (the image at the head of this piece is of a single green hydra digestive cell, with its population of symbiotic Chlorella algae clustered at the base of the cell), but I also worked on sea anemones and reef-forming corals.

I'm reminded of this by news of the death of Professor Lynn Margulis, who was one of the prominent workers in the symbiosis field. She was a friend and research associate of my Ph.D supervisor, Professor Sir David Smith, and I met her not only when she visited his labs, but at conferences in the UK and abroad. She was always a whirlwind of energy, promoting her ideas and probing everyone else's with intense acuity. She had forged a career at a time when women were in a minority in the sciences, and for years championed the highly unfashionable idea that mitochondria (the energy-generating organelles found in almost every cell of eukaryotic organisms) and plant chloroplasts (the organelles where photosynthesis takes place) had once been independent organisms that had established a symbiotic relationship with the ancestors of animals and of plants. This theory of symbiogenesis had been first advanced by K. S. Mereschkovsky and Ivan Wallin in the 1920s, but had passed into obscurity. Lynn Margulis dusted it down and supported it with evidence that pointed to the residual bacterial characteristics of the two types of organelles, and their possession of small amounts of DNA. That the symbiotic origin of both mitochondria and chloroplasts is now widely accepted is due almost entirely to Lynn Margulis's dogged and tireless work.

She advanced the idea that flagellae in animal cells were the remnants of bacterial symbionts with rather less success (one problem is that the whip-like flagellae don't possess any DNA), and her efforts to expand the idea that the central driver of evolution was symbiotic acquisition of new DNA rather than mutation of nuclear DNA likewise has not meet with much success. But she was also an early promotor of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, published papers in the then unfashionable field of exobiology, and her symbiogenesis theory is a cornerstone of the idea that symbiosis and other forms of cooperation have made important contributions to the evolution of life on Earth. I admired her hugely. Ava atque vale.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 3

2011-11-21T16:41:00.001Z

Chapter 3 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available here. The previous two chapters are here, and here. The next chapter will be posted on Friday 25th November.

An Analogy

2011-11-20T17:25:00.000Z

Came to me while I was watching Hearts of Darkness. At its best, science fiction's portrayal of the future is similar to the portrayal of the Viet Nam war in Apocalypse Now.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 2

2011-11-18T12:14:00.003Z

Here's the second chapter of my new novel, In The Mouth Of The Whale. (The first chapter is here.) No spoilers here, for those who might want until the novel is released into the wild in January.

Currently listening to: Peg Leg Howell: 'Low Down Rounder Blues'
Currently reading: Don Delillo: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Currently writing: the last chapters of the second draft of the fourth Quiet War novel

Endorsing The Future

2011-11-16T17:23:00.002Z

This dates from the early 1980s, I think, back when hand-held computers you could program in BASIC were cutting edge. One small measure of how important Isaac Asimov was, as a cultural figure: he wasn't just the default face of American science fiction; he was also the default face of popular science writing. Now, as the newspapers and TV news keep reminding us, everything is like science fiction, so science-fiction writers are no longer needed to explain how amazing some bit of technological kit is, because we've come to expect the amazing. Now, we have hand-held computers with full-colour touch screens, wireless connectivity to the whole wide world, memories equivalent to the content of the Library of Congress, and magical AI assistants. And everyone takes them for granted. And it's kind of cool, because it means we really are living in the future. But what would be truly amazing, these days?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 1

2011-11-14T09:30:00.000Z

My new novel, In The Mouth of the Whale, is scheduled to be published in January next year. Following a long tradition, I'll be posting serial extracts every Monday and Friday from now until publication day. Here's the beginning of the first chapter:

When the Child was a child, a sturdy toddler not quite two years old, she and her mother moved to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the north-west corner of the Peixoto family’s territory in Greater Brazil. It was an old place, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an old garrison town on the Rio Negro, serving an army base and a depot for workers in the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps. Civilians, mostly descendants of Indians and early settlers, lived in a skewed grid of apartment blocks and bungalows beneath the green breast of the Fortaleza hill. Senior army officers, supervisors, and government officials rented villas along the Praia Grande, where in the dry season between September and January a beach appeared at the edge of the river. There was an airfield and a solar farm to the north, two schools, a hotel and half a dozen bars, a scruffy futbol pitch, a big church built in the brutalist style of the mid-twenty- first century, and a hospital, where the Child’s mother, Maria Hong-Owen, had taken up the position of resident surgeon.

Also Applies To Genre

2011-11-12T12:11:00.001Z

"The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticise the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."
Clement Greenberg

(Quoted by Gabriel Josipovici in Whatever Happened To Modernism; requoted by Nicolas Lezard in his review.)

'Bruce Springsteen'

2011-11-09T16:58:00.003Z

So I have a new short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', in the latest edition of Asimov's SF Magazine. It's one of the Jackaroo series that I've been working on for the past few years ('City of the Dead' is another), and is a kind of existential road trip that takes in a Chinese version of Las Vegas, aliens who collect human stories, and a mysterious necropolis. Starts like this:

‘I like your philosophers,’ the alien said. ‘Most were unintentional comedians, but a few
were on to something. Baudrillard, for instance.’
    I said that I wasn’t familiar with Mr Baudrillard’s work.
    ‘His speculations about things standing for things that do not exist were relatively sophisticated. Perhaps you will resurrect him one day. He and I would talk about where his ideas fit in the spectrum of simulacrum theory.’
    I said it sounded interesting.
    ‘You are being polite because part of your profession is to listen to the confessions of strangers. But you do not know what I am talking about, do you? It does not matter. I am mostly talking nonsense. I am free-associating. An effect of this interesting drink.’
    ‘Are you ready for another?’
    ‘This one is still working on me,’ the alien said.
    A shot glass of neat Seagram’s was balanced on top of his tank. Somehow, elements of the whisky were making their way out of the glass and into whatever was inside. According to the alien, a teeny-tiny demon was influencing space-time, inflating the usual, vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere outside the glass. Not molecules of alcohol, but what he called congeners. He was getting a buzz on the complex chemicals that gave the whisky its unique taste.

Eating Rites

2011-11-08T19:34:00.002Z

Food in science fiction too often gets short thrift; its quality is inversely related to advances in technology. From the nutrition pills in Gernsbackian SF to the slabs of green and brown and orange paste in 2001: A Space Odyssey, food is often seen as no more than fuel. The equivalent of those freeze-dried meals astronauts must massage into palatability with warm water. Dole yeast. Chicken Little. Food bricks. Crop algae. Syntho-steak. 'Take your protein pill and put your helmet on,' as ground control tells Major Tom. The future is food even faster than fast food.

Elsewhere, food is an exotic test of character, digestive system and morality. The trial-by-combat of the alien banquet in Iain M. Banks' Excession, for instance, or the talking beast which lugubriously points out its best cuts in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. And sometimes food, or the lack of it, is the engine of the plot. In Adam Roberts' By Light Alone, the majority of the world's population subsist on the photosynthetic nutrition of their hair; only the rich can indulge their base appetites. In Thomas M. Disch's magnificently bleak The Genocides, an alien food-crop overwhelms the Earth and threatens humanity with extinction. In Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the hero, Severian, consumes not only the flesh of his lover, but also her memories in an anthropophagic rite that's a dark parody of Holy Communion.

But for the practising SF novelist, how people grow or get food, prepare food, and eat and share food, can be a useful shorthand. A window on the ordinary unexamined life of the future, and the inner lives of its inhabitants. Severian, who grew up in a parsimonious Guild, frequently refers not only to food, but to times when he is forced to go hungry. Rick Deckard's wait for a meal at a noodle stall in Blade Runner not only tells us something about his character's loneliness, but also something about the crowded multiculturalism of 2019 Los Angeles. In The Matrix, the mucoid slop served aboard the hovercraft captained by Morpheus underscores the parlous state of free humans; it's so bad that the temptation of a tasty virtual steak is part of the deal with the devil made by a traitor. Soylent Green in Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room has nothing to do with the film verson's silly twist, but is a staple food in an overpopulated and undernourished world, made from (geddit?) soy beans and lentils, while the care with which the hero's ancient roommate tends his planters of herbs and onions tells us not only something about their value, but underscores his nostalgia for how things once were.

We're not only what we eat; we're also defined by how we eat it, and how much we value it. But our place at the top of the food chain isn't guaranteed. As the crew of The Nostromo discovered during their last communal meal in Alien, sometimes we're the meat on something else's table.

(Thanks to those on Twitter who responded to my question about famous food moments in SF with some great examples. Soylent Green and That Scene in Alien were by far the most popular.)

Aliens Among Us

2011-11-01T16:54:00.000Z

Out today, this anthology of stories about aliens, in which my little tale of an invasion of Boltzmann Brains appears along with stories by Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, Karen Joy Fowler, Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . . You can find the table of contents here, with links to commentary, and some of the stories.

Once upon a time, most stories about aliens were space wars or first contact adventures set in the far future, or attempts to imagine the truly alien in truly alien settings. Most of the stories here are set in the present day, refracting human behaviour through the viewpoint of the Other, or using the Other to isolate and magnify some odd aspect of human behaviour. We have met the alien, and he is us.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (13)

2011-10-30T15:17:00.003Z

At first glance, the 1963 Penguin edition of Roy Lewis’s first and best-known novel is science fiction. After all, it says so on the cover: it was selected by Brian Aldiss, who in the early 1960s was editor of Penguin’s SF series. But The Evolution Man was first published in hardback as a non-genre novel with the title What We Did To Father, and its last reprinted edition wasn't labeled as SF either. Permeable things, genre boundaries.

Narrated by one of the sons of a Palaeolithic mad scientist, the eponymous evolution man, this short and wickedly funny novel compresses the story of the development of the technological and cultural inventions that shaped the evolution of Homo sapiens into the history of a couple of generations of a family in Palaeolithic Uganda. A good deal of the novel’s comedy springs from farcical scenes generated by compression (‘Good Gracious!’ [Father] gasped. ‘While I have been talking to you and not even thinking about it, I have made a most important invention: the heavy-duty hunting spear with the fire-hardened point!’) and the atemporal knowledge and speech patterns of the characters (‘The carnivora had turned on us because of a shortage of ungulate game in the region.’), but it’s also a pitch-perfect parody of the drawing-room novel transposed on to a vividly realised stone-age milieu. Like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, The Evolution Man belongs to the very English school of deadpan (and often deeply black) absurdist humour, and as in many great English comedies, the narrator, like Mr Pooter, William Brown, and Captain Mainwaring, has absolutely no sense of humour. The novel’s best set-pieces, such as the narrator’s thorough besting by his future wife during his ham-handed attempt at courtship, turn on the refusal or failure of the object of the joke to see the funny side.

Although implacably opposed by the tree-dwelling Uncle Vanya (‘There was nothing wrong with the old Miocene’), Father institutes a programme of self-improvement with implacable logic and level-headed ingenuity. He works out how to steal fire from a volcano, and in short order he and other members of the family invent cooking, spear-hunting, animal traps, representational art, the afterlife, and (when Father bans incest) courtship. As Father succinctly puts it, ‘ . . . nature isn’t necessarily on the side of the big battalions. Nature is on the side of the species with the technological edge on the other fellow.’

But progress isn’t without cost. Globe-hopping Uncle Ian is killed when he decides to imitate the efforts by one of his nephews to domesticate animals: ‘the horse he had tried to ride - to get to America the quicker - proved not to be a horse at all; it was a hipparion.’ Father’s enthusiastic application of his discovery of how to make fire causes a conflagration that burns out the horde’s hunting grounds and forces them to move. And his sons are dismayed when he starts to give away their technological edge to all and sundry, and decide that he and his latest idea must be suppressed. As in so many science fiction novels (to borrow a phrase from Brian Aldiss), hubris is clobbered by nemesis. Father becomes a victim of his most deadly invention: the Arms Race.

Reality Check

2011-10-26T18:52:00.000+01:00

So I have just finished wincing my way through the proofs of In The Mouth of the Whale, and after using up what seemed to be about half a red ballpoint pen making corrections, I've turned them in to Gollancz. And that's that, after almost two years. The book is out of my head and out of my hands, and on its way to becoming a Thing, out there in the world. I've also received a couple of the bound proofs that will be sent to potential reviewers: very nice they look, too.

As a break from trying to read a novel word by word, sentence by sentence, I travelled down to Bristol for BristolCon, a one-day convention. Small but very buzzy, friendly, nicely organised (so you didn't notice all the organisation that went into it), mostly book-orientated, with plenty of writers present. Met friends, attended a couple of panels, performed on a couple of panels, read the first two pages of In The Mouth of the Whale to an audience. And because it was a fine warm day, went on walkabout for an hour or so. I lived in Bristol in the 1970s (1973 - 1980), back when it was a black-and-white existential film, and returned every so often, but haven't been back for, oh, at least ten years. Long enough to feel like a ghost searching for my own past. Some of the places I remembered are still there; others aren't. George's bookshop at the top of Park Street, for instance, where one gloomy day, in a kind of wretched gallery at the top of the shop, under a rain-lashed skylight, I discovered an immaculate remaindered first edition of William Golding's The Pyramid God. A snip at £2, especially as I later got it signed, after Golding had received his Nobel, and his knighthood. Also gone: Revolver Records, where I spent far too much time and money, buying LPs made of grooved vinyl you played with diamond needles. It was a long time ago.

Alternate History

2011-10-20T17:51:00.012+01:00

This is the first few pages of an alternate beginning to Gardens of the Sun, some 20,000 words which I ditched because a) it set up the dichotomy at the heart of the novel a little too clunkily and b) because I decided it would be better to tell the story of the long road to peace from the point of view of the characters who'd been dragged into events leading up to war in The Quiet War. Might publish it as part of an ebook collection one day.

Everywhere Karyl Mezhidov went, people were talking about war. One day, he stopped at a little oasis close to the Palatine Linea, in the south-east of the sub-saturnian hemisphere of Dione, and discovered that an extended family from Paris had taken up residence. Refugees.

Karyl would have wished them luck and moved right on, to another oasis or shelter, or to one of his caches of supplies, but he’d been out prospecting a long time, he was low on food and fuel, and besides, they seemed like nice people and it would have been rude to have turned down their offer of hospitality. So after he’d plugged his rolligon into the oasis’s grid, replenished its food maker with yeast base, and fixed a minor problem with the suspension of the rear off-side wheel, he spent a little time working up the details of a trade for some of the phosphates he’d extracted from a drift in exchange for the family’s hospitality, so neither side would have to short out on kudos. And when that was sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, he sat down for the evening meal with the family and a woman who, like him, was passing through on her way to somewhere else.

They all sat around a rug spread by the stream that ran around the circumference of the oasis, in the shade of pines and firs, the oasis’s chandelier of sunlamps dimming down to twilight, and the tent’s big panes beginning to polarize; although the sun at Saturn delivered only four per cent of the insolation on Earth’s surface, and at this high southern latitude hung low even at noon, it was becoming brighter than the darkening interior. The oasis sat in a neat round crater with a slumped rim, so there was a good view across a cratered swale to a flat-topped hill, the edge of Adstratus Crater, that rose above the close, curved horizon against the black sky. The view kept drawing Karyl’s attention as he told his hosts a little about his prospecting work, and they told him the latest news from Paris, the increasing paranoia, the peace wardens who had been armed with pistols and were enforcing a raft of new regulations and zealously searching out dissenters. Because its mayor was at the forefront of opposition to the presence of ships from Earth in the Saturn System, everyone was convinced that Paris was going to be hit hard when the war began, and many citizens were leaving for settlements where they had family connections, or for untenanted oases like this one, planning to sit things out as best they could.

‘No one and no place will be safe anywhere on any of the moons,’ Shizuko, the family’s other guest, said scornfully. ‘Sure, they’ll go for the cities first. But when they have the cities under control, they’ll go after the big settlements, and then everyone else. Moving here, you’re just putting off the inevitable.’

Shizuko was a serious and intense young woman with a tall crest of red hair and bright yellow eyes. She disagreed loudly and volubly with almost everything the family said, and clearly thought that Karyl was a possible ally. Smiling at him now, saying that even gypsies like him wouldn’t be safe, asking him what he would do when the inevitable happened.

Everywhere he went, people were always asking him for his opinion about the war. Truth was, he didn’t have an opinion. Oh, he knew that it was inevitable. Ships of the Brazilian and European joint expedition had been in orbit around Mimas for months, the Pacific Community had set up a camp on Phoebe, at the outer edge of the Saturn System, and although there were all kinds of diplomatic discussions, although many cities had claimed neutrality, it was clear that the three great powers wanted to take control of the entire Saturn System. But if it was inevitable, then there wasn’t anything that could be done to stop it, and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t see why it should change things. Why would anyone be interested in what he did?

So he shrugged and said that he hoped he’d be able to keep on working.

‘Do you really think they’ll let you or anyone else wander around? They’ll round you up,’ Shizuko said. The lamps set amongst the bowls of food spread on the rug put bright sparks in her yellow eyes as she looked at everyone around her. ‘All of you. Probably lock you up inside Paris, along with everyone else. If they don’t H-bomb the city first, that is, or drop a rock on it. If they do that, they’ll lock you up in a camp instead, or truck you off to Mimas or Rhea or Tethys. They’ll turn the entire system into a prison camp, no exceptions. So rather than trying to pretend that the war doesn’t have anything to do with you, you should be doing something about it, right now.’

‘We have already done something,’ David, the eldest family member said. ‘We have moved here.’

People lounging around the rug laughed, but Shizuko wasn’t going to be put off. She was one of those tedious people who went everywhere with an agenda at the forefront of their minds.

‘They already control the sky. Their ships are faster than our ships, they are armed with real weapons, and they are crammed with soldiers. Soon they’ll control the cities too. And then everything else. Despite what your mayor says, there’s nothing we can do about that - I see some of you are surprised to hear that hear that I agree with you, but it’s perfectly obvious. We can’t win this war, but we can win the peace. There aren’t many of them, and they are far from home. History teaches us that occupation of one country by another always ends in the defeat or retreat of the occupier. There are things we can do to hasten that,’ Shizuko said, and launched into a brief and efficient lecture about preparing for life after war, and strategies for making the lives of the invaders from Earth as uncomfortable as possible.

There was an embarrassed silence when she had finished. At last, David said, ‘Clearly you have your way, and we have ours.’

‘Trying to hide out here won’t work.’

‘We are not trying to hide. We are here. We make no secret of it to you or to anyone else.’

‘It doesn’t matter. They’ll come for you any way. They’ll take you away.’

‘No,’ David said. ‘We will resist them. Not like you, by sabotage, attacks on their soldiers, assassination, and so on. But by nonviolence. You shake your head. You think no doubt that it is no more than pacifism. It is not. It is a means of persuasion, just as violence is a means of persuasion. But instead of using force and causing suffering to defeat the enemy, we will use our minds, and win over the enemy by love.’

He was short, with a fringe of white hair around a liver-spotted pate, and a considerable belly spilling into the lap of his shorts. Clearly one of the original settlers, one of the people who had fled the Moon a hundred years ago, when Earth had made it clear that the Lunar refuges would be closed and their populations forcibly repatriated. Like Karyl’s grandfather, who had told him many stories of those hard times. The last time Karyl had exchanged messages with Rainbow Bridge, he’d been told that everyone was sitting tight and hoping for the best. Even though there was a ship from Earth in orbit around Callisto and it was obvious that what was going to happen here was going to happen there, too. He wondered now what it must be like to have lived so long that you found yourself caught up in the same kind of situation all over again. Clearly, it hadn’t caused David to lose hope. He spoke quietly but forcefully, and the people around him clearly agreed because they were nodding and smiling. He was not only an unreconstructed human being, with his pot belly and thatch of chest hair and crooked toe nails, he was also an old-fashioned patriarch -- a rarity in the patchwork of matriarchal societies of the Saturn System.

‘I’m sorry to hear it, because they’ll kill you,’ Shizuko said.

‘We are prepared for that,’ a woman nursing a baby said, with a sharp look that Shizuko met with a smile.

‘People will die, no doubt,’ David said. ‘But in the end, nonviolence is stronger than violence.’

Shizuko laughed and said that they had their way and she and her friends had hers, they’d see who would be more successful. ‘I know that you didn’t try nonviolence on your mayor, or if you did you had no luck.’

‘He isn’t our enemy,’ David said.

And there it was again, the divide between generations. Most of the pioneers and their children and grandchildren wanted nothing to do with war, and weren’t willing to fight against the enemy. But their great-grandchildren, the rising generation of Outers, were more aggressive because they believed that they had more to lose. They’d already been struggling to overcome the resistance of the older generations to expansion further outwards, to the moons of Uranus and Neptune and beyond. And now they wanted to confront the enemy head on, because the enemy wanted to put an end their dream of expansion before it had begun. For a hundred years, the Outer System had been more or less left alone as Earth recovered from the catastrophe of the Overturn: ecological crashes and climate change ten times worse than anthropogenic global warming, and wars and famines too. But now the three great powers of Earth had done much of the great work of reclamation and reconstruction they had turned their attention outwards, to the little utopian principalities of
the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Wanted to bring them under control before they spread into the outer dark, and changed themselves so radically that they would become, in effect, another human species. One with greater powers than unreconstructed humans, angels or devils who wouldn’t ever be bound by the laws of old Earth.

Karyl had heard the same arguments over and again ever since the first ship from Earth had arrived in the Saturn System, and nothing had changed. One side argued for the higher moral ground, whether it was pacifism or nonviolent resistance, citing the success of Gandhi, the fall of the Soviet empire, the Arab Spring, and so on; the other believed that the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had been right to assert that human beings were born perfectible, but would never be perfect, that violence was an indelible part of human nature that couldn’t be edited out without destroying all those qualities - fearless exploration, insatiable curiosity, creativity - necessary to the human spirit. And so the Outers were divided amongst themselves, and couldn’t agree what to do about the enemy, and so nothing was done. It was depressing, really, and so unnecessary. Even if the Outers did spread outward, and radically change themselves, it would have nothing to do with Earth. And if the great powers of Earth wanted access to the scientific knowledge that the Outers had preserved and accumulated in the last century, there was surely a way of trading it. Everything could be traded for everything else, after all. Karyl had tried out these arguments long before, on a woman he’d slept with while staying over in the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, and she’d told him that the three great powers weren’t really going to war against the Outers - no, the Outers were the prize that Earth’s great powers were squabbling over amongst themselves. Once one looked liked winning the prize the others had to join in.

Whatever. Everyone around the rug argued amongst themselves and the chandelier and the moonscape dimmed down, and red and green and blue fireflies winked under the dark boughs of the firs and pines, and Karyl drank too much of the pine-sap mead that was being passed around, and when he woke early the next morning he had a bad headache that the traditional cure of breathing pure oxygen didn’t quite flush away. He was hoping to drive off without any fuss, but Shizuko came into the garage as he was performing some final checks on his rolligon. She was getting ready to leave too, she said, and asked him where he was heading next.

‘Oh, down the Palantine Linea, perhaps. Out in that direction, somewhere or other.’

Karyl was wary because it was clear that the woman was a member of the resistance, although it wasn’t called the resistance, but ‘our thing’ or ‘this thing of ours’. They were everywhere, trotting out their agenda, looking for recruits, asking favours.

Shizuko laughed. ‘It’s all right. I don’t intend to follow you. You have your prospecting, and I have business of my own. And I’m not going to try to recruit you. You’re from Callisto after all, and I hear that they’re a pretty conservative lot in the Jupiter System. Still, I have to admit that someone like you would be very useful. You gypsies know Dione like no one else, you have all kinds of hideaways and caches . . .’

She was standing close, with one hand on his arm, smiling down at him, her gaze warm and more golden, in the bright light of the garage, than yellow. Karyl felt a definite attraction to her, and wondered if she trying to seduce him, if she was wearing a pheromone or a hypnotic. Not that she’d need any biochemical help. It had been a long time since Karyl had slept with anyone, he’d been spending a lot of time out in the country these days, avoiding as much as possible all the nonsense about war. And she was quite a woman too, powerful and confident . . .

Shizuko laughed again, and broke the spell, and said again that she wouldn’t try to persuade him, but perhaps he could think hard about things. ‘And when it comes, as it will, when things change, as they will, remember that we need your help.’

‘What will you do?’

Shizuko’s gaze grew darkly serious. ‘I’ll fight them in any way I can.’

‘Well, I hope it doesn’t come to it.’

‘It will. It’s happening right now. Coming straight towards us. Can’t you feel it?’

Her grip had tightened on his arm and her face was close to his and he could feel her heat and was breathing in her spice. Then she stepped back and the spell was broken. She looked around at the bare walls of the garage and then lifted her tunic to reveal a small plastic tool tucked into the waistband of her shorts. A 9mm recoilless pistol made by a manufactory in Paris, Shizuko said. The same kind of weapon carried by the peace wardens there.

Karyl felt a cold shock cleave through him. He’d never seen a pistol before. It was like being confronted with a truly wild and deadly animal.

Shizuko told him that it shot explosive rounds. One was more than enough to kill a person. If they tried to capture her, she said, she would kill as many of them as she could and then kill herself, it was better to die free than live in chains.

So she was crazy, Karyl thought. Driven crazy by thinking about the war all the time, or already crazy and refusing to take her meds. Or just an extreme example of the way people thought, here. That was the difference between people from Saturn System and people like him. They thought themselves more radical, were more Adventurous. They though that people like him were reactionaries, clinging to old ways whose usefulness had long ended. But he liked his life. The life he had made.

He told Shizuko to take care, and she laughed and told him that she knew how to take care of herself because she had thought long and hard about it, she hoped he’d do the same.

He climbed into his rolligon, feeling a big surge of fear because he had to turn his back on the crazy woman and her venomous little tool, and managed to seal it up, and sat, quivering, in the big seat at the front of its bubble for a few minutes, until he’d calmed down. Then he started the rolligon up and drove through the inner doors and they closed behind him and the air was pumped out and the outer doors opened and he drove out into Dione’s late afternoon.

He should have felt elated at having escaped, free again to go anywhere he wanted without anyone telling him what he should do, but his bad feeling clung to him. He couldn’t help wondering what Shizuko had been doing down in the garage. Maybe just checking over her rolligon. Or maybe sticking a transponder on his. She had said that he would be useful, that he must know all kinds of hiding places. Maybe she wanted to see where he went so that she could make use of his places. Find his caches. Maybe she wanted to follow him . . .

Crazy thoughts feeding on each other like a knot of snakes. But she was crazy, so it was probably a good precaution to try to think like her, to figure out if she wanted something from him, what it was.

Still, he felt a touch of guilt and foolishness when he turned off the road, and cut east in a half-circle that took him back towards the oasis. It was late afternoon, and the sun hung low at the horizon, behind the rolligon, which chased its long shadow across smooth dusty ground where the small and large bowls of rimless craters were so brimful with blackness that they looked like holes punched through reality, with only the faintest gleam on their sunward crescents lending them any indication of dimension. Saturn, almost full, was bisected by the eastern horizon, like a fat man trying to get out of a pool, the narrow bright curve of the rings aimed almost straight up.

Four kilometers from the oasis, Karyl parked the rolligon and had the AI run a full scan on every radio channel and failed to find the beep of a transponder, then climbed into his pressure suit and clambered out of the lock and loped on a little way until the green gleam of the oasis appeared like a star on the curve of the horizon. He stood still and watched it for a little while, using the magnifying feature of his helmet’s faceplate. It was neatly fitted into the crater, the top of its coping wall level with the slumped rim, the polygonal elements of its hemispherical tent blankly shining with sunlight. Farm tubes packed with green plants under bright lights were half-sunk into the lobate apron off to one side, where ejecta melted by the heat of the impact that had formed the crater had settled and refrozen. Nothing moved out there: no sign of Shizuko’s rolligon. Maybe she had already left, heading west as she’d told him. Or maybe she was still trying to convert the family to her cause, or was working to pay off the debt of hospitality.

So at last, feeling angry now as well as foolish at the way the war had infected him with stupid paranoid thoughts, Karyl walked back to the rolligon and got in and turned it around and drove off out across Dione.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (12)

2011-10-18T18:04:00.000+01:00

The wind that blew in their faces was cold, yet somehow stale. They were looking from a high terrace and there was a great landscape spread out below them.
Low down and near the horizon hung a great red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen.
C.S. Lewis The Magician's Nephew

Humanity

2011-10-16T18:33:00.001+01:00

They fell silent once more, staring out of the black window, but they found only each other's faces in there and turned away.
Karin Fossum, Calling Out For You

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (11)

2011-10-10T23:17:00.002+01:00

John Martin's Paradise Lost - Satan Presiding Over The Infernal Council.

Now You See It

2011-10-03T20:17:00.000+01:00

So I went on holiday again, this time to St Ives, Cornwall (1950s seaside ambience enhanced by its dinky branch-line, but with C21 food, and a fractal coast walk from Zennor I thoroughly recommend). And now I'm working on a new draft of the next novel, and at any moment the proofs for In the Mouth of the Whale will arrive. My last chance to go through the text and remove anything unsightly.

Which reminds me about the recent ministorm about whether or not Fomalhaut b, the Jupiter-sized exoplanet imaged by the Hubble Telescope, a few years ago, actually exists. Scientists were able to trace Fomalhaut b's orbit from Hubble Telescope images from 2004 and 2008. Now, new data seems to show that Fomalhaut b isn't where it should be, at the inner edge of the dust ring (where, supposedly, it is sweeping the edge clean and giving it the sharp profile that suggested the presence of a planet before Fomalhaut b was imaged), but seems to have wandered into the edge of the ring. One astronomer, Ray Jayawardhana, suggests this proves Fomalhaut b is an artifact; another, Paul Kallas, the lead investigator of the team which first identified Fomalhaut b, suggests it's due to use of a different Hubble imaging system, after the one that took the 2004 and 2008 images failed, something sort of backed up by a third astronomer, Christian Marois, who points out that since Fomalhaut b has an orbit with a period of some 800 years, it's highly unlikely that it would throw a substantial deviation so soon after it was discovered.

Jayawardhana and Kallas have a history of rivalry, but that won't determine the existence or otherwise of Fomalhaut b; only more measurements will. How different science would be if scientific truths were determined by force of will; it would be like . . . magic.

I have some small interest in this. Part of In the Mouth of the Whale is set in the inner edge of Fomalhaut's ring of dust; part of it is set on a ringed, Jupiter-sized gas giant just inside that inner edge. If Fomalhaut b turns out not to exist, then I guess I'll have to suggest that another planet just like it does, only we haven't discovered it yet. Meanwhile, as the very good report about the kerfuffle in Nature concludes:

For its part, Fomalhaut b seems to know what it's doing, even if no one else does.

There Are Doors (Slight Return)

2011-10-01T14:50:00.000+01:00

Spotted in Bruges, by the side of a canal.

A Transect

2011-09-19T11:34:00.000+01:00

When I get stuck on a plot point or find myself typing instead of writing, a walk usually clears my head and gets me thinking again. This is one of my longer walks, more or less due south to the Thames.

Under A Double Star

2011-09-16T18:37:00.001+01:00

Into town today to talk for a couple of minutes on the BBC World Service about the recent discovery of a planet orbiting the Kepler-16 binary system. Both stars are smaller than the sun, one an orange K-type star, the other a red dwarf; the orbit of the planet, Kepler-16b, is similar to that of Venus; comparisons have been made to Star Wars' Tatooine (the hook on which so many news stories have been hung). But Kepler-16b is about the size of Saturn, although with a higher density, suggesting that it possesses a core of ice or rock about half its diameter, enveloped in deep atmosphere at a chilly -100° C. Not much chance for any carbon-based life like ours to see those double sunsets and sunrises, then, although it's possible that the planet's core might retain some heat and warm lower layers of its atmosphere, or that there might be a moon with an atmosphere that's both thick enough and with the right composition to generate a greenhouse effect.

Given that the Kepler spacecraft has discovered one planet around a stable binary star system, it's pretty likely that there are plenty more out there, and that some will be much more Earth-like than Kepler-16b. Perhaps there are even planets around triple-star systems; maybe even a planet or two orbiting a system with six suns, as in Isaac Asimov's short story 'Nightfall', where night is a rare and frightening event . . .

Well, it's nice to know that there are real-life equivalents of science-fictional scenarios. Even better, we're beginning to understand that the universe is stranger than we can imagine. Kepler-16b isn't the first explanet to be discovered orbiting a binary system. There are two planets bigger than Jupiter orbiting the eclipsing binary NN Serpentis, 1700 light years away. The stars, a red dwarf and a white dwarf, are believed to be a cataclysmic variable system, with the material drawn off from the red dwarf forming an accretion disc around the white dwarf. When material from the disc falls on to the white dwarf, it triggers nuclear fusion and a cataclysmic outburst. If enough material falls on to the white dwarf it could increase the interior density of the white dwarf, ignite runaway carbon fusion, and trigger a supernova. Imagine the view from a moon of one of those gas giants if that happens . . .

O Superman

2011-09-15T08:38:00.000+01:00

‘In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.’

Fritz Leiber, ‘Poor Superman’

On Mars

2011-09-13T09:26:00.000+01:00

Found in PC World magazine during research:

"Probably the most special day I've had as a rover [driver] was the day I built my first drive solo on Mars," [Ashley] Stroupe said. "We were on the plateau on Husband Hill, and we were driving along the edge to get imagery of the valley below. I parked us right on the edge and got a spectacular view."

"I remember looking at those tracks and realizing what they meant -- my first tracks on Mars, and the first tracks actually made by a woman driving on another planet," she said. "I am proud of it every time I see that panorama from the very top looking down at those tracks."

It's an especially powerful piece of empathy or projection because driving a rover is more like one of those ancient text-based computer games than Gran Turismo or Second Life. The Mars rover team at JPL keep in contact with their machine viaNASA's Deep Space Network, and because their time on the network is limited and the round-trip for signals between Earth and Mars takes between 8 and 42 minutes, driving by direct law isn't possible. Instead, while the rover rests during the Martian night, its team of drivers and scientists plan out the next day's moves, code them, and test and retest them before uploading them. The rover then executes those moves the next day. Yet note how by the second sentence of Stroupe's description, the pronoun has changed from I to we. Identification is complete. "We were on the plateau on Husband Hill..." We were on Mars...

Cover Me

2011-09-09T17:44:00.000+01:00

Hey, here's the cover for In The Mouth of the Whale. It's by Sidonie Beresford-Browne, and I like it a lot. There's a lot going on in the novel, but quite a bit of it involves spaceships (I know they have wings: they're on their way down into the atmosphere) and chunky worldlets and a gas giant.

The Hippity-Hop Theory of Writing

2011-09-07T09:03:00.000+01:00

"Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."

Ann Beattie (from The Paris Review)

Snark Hunting

2011-09-02T12:58:00.000+01:00

I was away - a short break in Bruges. Lovely, thanks. And now I'm busy with the copy edit of In The Mouth of the Whale, dealing with queries and corrections raised by a fantastically sharp-eyed editor with a good and solidly old-fashioned (in the best sense of the world) grounding in grammar who has not only read every word and noted every punctuation mark of the MS, but has queried the correctness and value of each and every one too. It's the first time I've done this kind of thing entirely on screen. For every other novel and story of mine, I transferred marks made on a printed MS to an electronic file; this time, I'm hunting for overstrikes and red-lined corrections with the help of the search-and-replace function, and recalling a little of the performance anxiety I felt when I transferred from typewriter to word processor. But I get to read the whole thing again, this time in physical form, when the proofs are delivered, and the thing moves another step closer to actuality.

Some Remarks on In The Mouth of the Whale

2011-08-23T20:45:00.000+01:00

It’s a stand-alone novel that’s set 1500 years after The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun and picks up the story of one of the players in the old drama: Sri Hong-Owen, a gene wizard who is her own greatest experimental subject.

Sri wants to live forever. After a treatment that went badly wrong left her confined to a vat, she created a strange family from her own flesh and set off for the star Fomalhaut, to found her own empire in its great planetary ring. But history has overtaken her, as history always overtakes people who live too long. Her starship was damaged; she died; those of her children who survived have rebooted her by recreating her childhood.

Meanwhile, a posthuman group, the Quick, has reached Fomalhaut ahead of Sri and founded a new civilisation which fell to another group, the fierce and largely unmodified True, who enslaved the Quick and set up their own empire. And now, as Sri’s starship approaches Fomalhaut, the True are fighting interlopers from another interstellar colony for control of the gas giant Cthuga, whose core may be the home of a vast strange intellect.

What else? There’s an outcast librarian who, with the help of his Quick servant, fights demons in fragments of a vast data base. The disappearance of one of the scions of a powerful family. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A big dumb object floating in atmosphere of a gas giant planet, probing for signs of life. War in the air. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of a cult that’s lasted 1500 years. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution. The utility of intelligence. The cost of longevity, and that perennial problem of what to do for the rest of your life after you die . . .

Coming soon, as they say.

Sense/Memory

2011-08-17T18:24:00.000+01:00

Today's walking break took me along the Regents Canal to St Pancras, then back up through a scrappy neighbourhood north of Euston Road's hurricane of tin and carbon monoxide. Very quiet there, only a few cars parked up and the air heavy with sultry August heat, pavements dusty and brick walls radiating warmth, this specific combination twitching a vivid and vertiginous memory almost fifty years old of walking aimlessly along a half-remembered summer street close to the bungalow in Portchester my family rented for a year.

Writing a novel, someone wrote, is an act of memory. I'm halfway through the second draft of the ongoing, although much of it, so far, seems to be new stuff.

Some links:

A shooting star seen from orbit
An arrow-shaped cloud the size of Texas on Saturn's moon Titan.
Odyssey crater, Mars.
Vesta's wacky craters.

Spaceships That Aren't Really Spaceships (1)

2011-08-16T15:09:00.001+01:00

Miss Great Britain III

Retromania

2011-08-15T19:45:00.000+01:00

Just received in the post, a copy of a spiffy little hardback edition of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? done up in early 1960s Gollancz yellow-jacket style (inducing in me vertiginous nostalgia for the SF novels in like livery that I read way back when, when I first started reading SF), with a short introduction what I wrote.* An honour to be asked; a joy to reread the novel, and rediscover how swift, and sad, and funny it is.

It's due out on the 1st of September, part of the 50th birthday celebrations of Gollancz's science-fiction and fantasy line. Four other SF novels and five fantasy novels will be published in the same format at the same time. They were chosen by readers from a short list of eligible** titles. You can find the listings and other details here.

*readers old enough to remember searching out Gollancz yellowbacks in their local libraries will get the reference at once
**that is, titles to which Gollancz have the hardback rights

Red Remembered Hills

2011-08-11T20:15:00.002+01:00

Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Damien Bouic

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have taken many panoramic pictures of the Martian landscapes they've traversed, but I think that this is one of the loveliest. (To see it full-size, check out the entry in the Planetary Society's blog, where I found it; a variation on the same scene can be found here.) It's a view taken by Opportunity two days ago, looking across the western foothills of the rim of Endeavour Crater, and it's lovely for two reasons.

The first, for those who have been following the progress of the rovers since they landed on Mars more than seven years ago, is that this is the end of a small but epic journey of some 21 kilometres that began in 2008, after Opportunity left Victoria Crater. All that time, driving backwards because one of her front wheels is jammed, the rover has traversed a landscape of rippled sand and exposed plates of rock, interrupted by the occasional smashed dish of a small crater. Twenty-one kilometres - 13 miles - doesn't sound much. A good afternoon's ramble. But Opportunity is no bigger than a golf cart, is long past her warranty date (she was supposed to operate for only 90 Martian days, or sols), is being steered by remote control by operators on Earth, and the terrain, while it has been mapped and photographed by orbiting spacecraft, contains unknown perils and traps. While Opportunity was travelling, her sister rover, Spirit, became inextricably stuck in a patch of loose sand, and succumbed to the Martian winter after operating as a stationary science platform for more than a year. Opportunity ploughed on, backwards. At sol 2681 she finally reached Spirit Point, named after her sister rover and at the edge of a ridge known as Cape York. Now she's ready to begin the science part of her fifth mission extension. Endeavour Crater is some 22 kilometres across, much bigger than Victoria Crater. The rock layers exposed by the impact that created it are deeper and older, and there are signs that some of the layers are clay-bearing phyllosilicates formed in the presence of water.

But the other reason it's an especially lovely view is that it is in many ways quite Earth-like. The ridges may mark the edge of an impact crater (and the rocks in the foreground were thrown from another much small impact crater beyond the right-hand side of the photomosaic), but they have been eroded into soft shapes by millions of years of wind-blown sand, and they are also softened by the hazy atmosphere, giving a very familiar effect of a landscape fading into the distance. Alien and familiar, they wouldn't look out of place in an Earthly desert. It's very easy to imagine standing there, and walking forward into the unknown.

Drive, He Said

2011-07-29T16:43:00.000+01:00

'All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behaviour. That behaviour tells you much more than you could ever learn from its political ideas. Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together.'
Jean Baudrillard, America

More Soviet SF

2011-07-28T09:51:00.006+01:00

To the BFI Southbank last night, to see two more films in the BFI's excellent Kosmos: A Soviet Space Odyssey. The first, Mars (1968), was the last major film made by director Pavel Klushantsev (Road to the Stars) before his contract with Odessa Studios was terminated in 1972, and he was forced into retirement. I was looking forward to seeing Mars because a couple of clips in the documentary that accompanied the screening of Road to the Stars showed a wonderfully gonzo alien scenario complete with cosmonaut dog in a dog-shaped spacesuit. Well, the dog didn't disappoint, but the bulk of the film is a lively but badly dated educational documentary showing that you can prove anything by analogy -- even, in 1968, after Mariner 4 showed Mars to be a battered hostile world lacking any of the romance implied by Percival Lowell's 'canals', the presence of higher forms of Martian life. Klushantsev's depictions of possible variations of life on Mars are marvellous, however, and the brief portrayal of a lifeless Mars is startlingly close to close-up images beamed back by the Viking landers and other American robots.

Toward Meeting A Dream, from 1963, is a more conventional science-fiction film in which aliens from a nearby star are attracted to Earth by the broadcast of a particular piece of music, crashland on Mars, and are rescued by hero cosmonauts. The special effects (re-used by American director Curtis Harrington in his SF potboiler Queen of Blood) depicting both Mars and the alien world and its advanced technology are state-of-the-art, as good as anything in Forbidden Planet, and the Russian space facilities on the Earth and Moon are equipped with all kinds of realistic hardware, but as for the story and characters . . . well, let's just say Soviet SF cinema operated on conventions at a slant to Western expectations. During a conversation afterwards, Kim Newman (who has seen most of the films in the BFI's season) and I identified the following Rules for Successful Soviet SF:

(1) There must be a stirring song, repeated at intervals, and written by one of the characters.
(2) There is no real plot beyond depictions of the selfless heroism of the characters, but a narrator will fill in any holes in the story.
(3) There is no plot because there must be no conflict or violence: problems are solved by application of idealism and logic rather than fists and rayguns. In Toward Meeting A Dream, an American scientist argues that aliens approaching Earth may be hostile and bent on conquering the human race, and is, at the end, very publicly humiliated.
(4) Characters are differentiated by random tags, and there must be no character development (because that would imply that the Soviet heroes possessed flaws which must be corrected). So if you're, say, a chess-playing joker at the beginning of the film, for the rest of the story you'll be carrying a chessboard and, when your comrades refuse to play you because they know you're the best chess-playing cosmonaut in the universe, you'll make a joke about it.
(5) As in American SF of the period, the only female character on the ship operates the switchboard.
(6) If a character dies, it will turn out that the whole story was not only a dream, but it was his dream. And at the very end, some element of it will come true.
(7) Pack all this into a film less than an hour long, either to make room for the main feature, or for a two-hour documentary on pig-iron production in Kazakhstan.

Ongoing

2011-07-20T17:59:00.003+01:00

Most writers are interested in how other writers write. In their environments; in their habits; in their productivity. Not because they’re neurotics, worried that they’re doing it right, or working hard enough (or not only because they’re neurotics), but because writing is a private process, and a mysterious one, too. In a piece for last Saturday’s The Week In Books feature in the Guardian (which the Guardian doesn’t seem to archive online, any more, so I can’t provide a link), Philip Hensher noted that his friend Alan Hollinghurst ‘is a devotee of Ishiguro’s “crash” method. After a long period of planning and thinking, the author retreats into a cell and writes furiously for up to 12 hours a day.’ Hensher’s method, on the other hand, is slow and steady:

Writing my latest novel, King of the Badgers, I got up at 6:30, five to six days a week, and wrote until 10. I reckon to produce between 400 and 1,500 words a day, and then do a lot of crossing out.

There are other methods, of course - Vladimir Nabokov wrote sentences and paragraphs on index cards, and then assembled them into the finished work. But it seems to me that the Crash and Slow and Steady methods are at either end of a spectrum that encompasses most common variants of writing methodology. I’m of the slow and steady school, although I don’t write within a set time but try instead to produce a fixed amount each day. I’m working on a second draft at the moment - rewriting, crossing out, inserting new material - and attempting to make a quota of around 2000 words a day. Yesterday I was writing so slowly that I could have used the blood sweated from my forehead for ink. Today I finished inside two hours. So it goes. I do have a plan before I start the first draft, but it isn't in any way detailed, and I certainly don't spend months thinking about the book before I start. As far as I’m concerned writing is a process of discovery. The trick is to keep moving forward.

New World

2011-07-19T15:49:00.000+01:00

An image of Vesta taken by the Dawn spacecraft two days ago from a distance of 15,000 kilometres, when (as you probably know) it went into orbit around the asteroid. Dawn will slowly spiral inward, and will take many more images at closer range, but this is a great early look at the ravaged worldlet, the second largest body in the asteroid belt (bigger version here). We're looking down at the south pole, which about a billion years ago was hit by a large body. Some debris spalled off by the impact resurfaced Vesta; the rest, about 1% of Vesta's original mass, went into orbit around the sun. HED meteorites are part of this debris, so we already have samples of Vesta's crust. The big whack left behind a big crater. It's about 500 kilometres across, almost as wide as Vesta's mean diameter. The lump in the centre is an uplifted central peak; there are also huge cliffs, and ridges forming chevron-like features. Over at the Planetary Society blog, Emily Lakdawalla has posted a nice analysis, comparing the chevron features inside Vesta's south pole crater with those of Uranus's moon Miranda. Miranda's chevrons were probably formed by diapirs or plumes of upwelling warm ice; if the chevrons sit at the top of the plumes, those ridges may be the edges of uptilted blocks. Since we know that Vesta was once geologically active and almost certainly has an iron core that was once molten (all the HED meteorites are igneous material), it's tempting to speculate that big whack may have triggered some kind of residual geological activity. Could there be ancient volcanoes, on the opposite side?

Road to the Stars

2011-07-11T17:26:00.000+01:00

Last Friday, the day of the launch of the last space shuttle, and the end until who knows when of the United State’s capability to send human beings into space, I went the British Film Intitute to watch a marvellous old Russian film about space travel, Pavel Klushantsev’s Road to the Stars -- shown with a documentary, The Star Dreamer, that provided useful historical context and a nice overview of Klushantsev’s career.

Klushantsev began to make Road to the Stars in 1954. He’d started his career in a Leningrad studio making documentaries, and The Road to the Stars begins in straight-forward documentary style, with a dramatised biography of the father of astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and a sequence on early experiments in rocketry that establishes the basic physics of spaceflight. Then, without changing style (or the portentious narrator), the film jumps into the future. Ingenious special effects, with meticulously detailed models and sets, and realistic depictions of cosmonauts manoeuvring in free fall (amongst other tricks, Klushantsev shot actors hung on wires from below, and used a revolving set), are deployed to show the launch of the first three cosmonauts into space, the construction and operation of a space station in low Earth orbit, mapping the Moon’s surface by a robotic surveyor, and the first manned flight to the Moon. Some of the scenes allegedly influenced Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Just before Road to the Stars was finished, in 1957, Sputnik 1 went into orbit. The Russian authorities insisted that Klushantsev insert material about Earth’s first artificial moon, and gave his film a wide release. Space was the next big thing; the Soviet red star was in the ascendent; Road to the Stars was, as far as the authorities were concerned, a prime piece of propaganda. More than a million people saw it in Russia; it was screened in twenty- two other countries. Segments shown by Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news allegedly galvanised the American participants in the space race. Road to the Stars seemed like a blueprint for the Soviet conquest of space: space travel as an inevitable step in the evolution of Russia’s socialistic scientific utopia, proceeding by logical steps to the Moon, with journeys to other planets soon to follow.

It’s a future we didn’t get, of course. America won the race to the Moon; Nixon cancelled a programme to build rockets that would send astronauts to Mars; after the last Apollo mission, no human being has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Klushantsev went on to make a full-length feature film about the first expedition to Venus, Planet of the Storms, that showcased more marvellous special effects, but ran into trouble when a commissar objected to the tears of a female cosmonaut (‘No Soviet cosmonaut would cry’). His film was given a restricted release; the script for the next, about a race to the Moon involving Russian, American and German spacecraft that ended in peace and harmony, was rejected. He made further documentary-style films about space travel (scenes from one about Mars, with giant animated flowers and a dog in a dog-shaped spacesuit, look wonderful) but retired a disappointed man, more or less forgotten until American special-effects artist Robert Skotak tracked him down, just before his death in 1999.

Unsurprisingly, some of scenes in the film seem quaint (nothing dates like the future), but it’s infused with warmth and charm, and its cheery optimism about the benefits of space exploration and colonisation outshines the occasional passages of naked propaganda. At the end of Road to the Stars, two cosmonauts descend a spacecraft’s ladder to the Moon’s surface. There’s a close-up of the first tentative step, and the bootprint it leaves.

But there’s no solemnity; no tick-box of tasks to be performed. The cosmonauts dance out across the surface, and when they see the Earth floating above the Moon’s mountains, they embrace each other with glee, overwhelmed with amazement and happiness at being on the Moon. It’s a wonderfully touching moment, reminding us that although robot spacecraft have and still are sending back amazing pictures and reams of data, the old-fashioned notion of human exploration, while perhaps foolishly and unrealistically romantic, still stirs emotions no robot can reach.

(You can watch the whole film, without subtitles, here.)

J.G. Ballard's House

2011-07-11T16:16:00.000+01:00

...is for sale.

Free Entry to British Library Event

2011-07-08T11:26:00.001+01:00

I'm appearing on a panel at the British Library Tuesday 12th July, talking with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt and Kim Newman (and a virtual Margaret Atwood) about our favourite items in the Out of the World exhibition.

I have not one but two free entries up for grabs. If you want to come along, email me at PJCMcAuley at gmail dot com and I'll add your name to the list on the door. First to email wins!

EDIT: They're gone!

The Secret of My Success

2011-07-05T08:14:00.000+01:00

Harold Pinter on his plays, 1963 (pinched from Dangerous Minds):

I’m not a theorist. I’m not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and that’s all. That’s the sum of it.
I’ve had two full-length plays produced in London. The first ran a week, and the second ran a year. Of course, there are differences between the two plays. In The Birthday Party I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text, between phrases. In The Caretaker I cut out the dashes and used dots instead. So that instead of, say, “Look, dash, who, dash, I, dash, dash, dash,” the text would read, “Look, dot, dot, dot, who, dot, dot, dot, I, dot, dot, dot, dot.” So it’s possible to deduce from this that dots are more popular than dashes, and that’s why The Caretaker had a longer run than The Birthday Party. The fact that in neither case could you hear the dots and dashes in performance is beside the point. You can’t fool the critics for long. They can tell a dot from a dash a mile off, even if they can hear neither.

Where I'm At...

2011-07-04T20:08:00.001+01:00

...rather than 'where I've been', because I've been right here, behind the curtain, spending most of my time dealing with the editing stage of In the Mouth of The Whale. Right now, I have the whole thing in my head and can spin it around like a CAD/CAM model and examine its threads and connections, its components and framework from any angle. That won't last, but it has allowed me to know which changes were highly local, and which struck echoes and required secondary changes in various parts of the text. But now it's done, and the amended MS has been sent back, and I think that, if nothing else, I've pinned down the first word: When.

Meanwhile, I'm rereading a couple of novels for a panel at the British Library on July 12th, in which I'll be discussing favourites from the rather good Out of This World exhibition, along with Pat Cadigan, Toby Litt, Kim Newman, and the virtual Margaret Atwood.

Oh, and I've finished and sold a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. It should be in the January 2012 issue.

Meanwhile, below the cut in the last post, Boogeyman259 asks, 'Could you please send me your origional notes about remote sensing from Cowboy Angels.' Afraid I can't, Boogeyman, since I didn't make extensive notes about something mentioned only in passing. And anyway, gee, I hardly know you, and you don't give me any clue about why you want to know this stuff, or why you can't find it out for yourself. But you did say 'please' (I'm not being sarcastic; too many people demanding something or other don't), so I'm happy to tell you that the CIA were certainly into remote viewing once they realised what their Soviet counterparts were up to, in the psychic line. There are passages about it, and the rather eccentric cast of characters involved in it, in Jeffrey T. Richelson's The Wizards of Langley, and there's at least one whole book about it, too: Jim Schnabel's Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. I bet there's all kinds of stuff about this on the WWW, too, but I'm not going to look it up. It's probably at least as reliable as your average novelist: we do tend to make things up for a living, or at least bend and twist stubborn facts to more convenient shapes. In this case, though, I didn't have to make it up; in fact, the truth is (more than usual) a lot weirder than fiction.

The Idiot's Tale

2011-06-05T12:07:00.000+01:00

‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day to day living that wears you out.’ – Anton Chekhov

The relevance to the thinness of a certain mode of science fiction and fantasy, which advances narratives by a series of crises and cliffhangers, should be obvious.

Something For The Weekend

2011-05-27T09:37:00.000+01:00

Just put up on amazon in the UK and the US, the Kindle edition my short-story collection Little Machines, previously available only as a limited edition hardback. Cover by the multi-talented Michael Marshall Smith.

Monsters! Alien invasions! Lost Worlds! Mad Scientists! Secret Histories!

In the seventeen stories collected here, multiple award-winning author Paul McAuley takes a fresh look at staple themes spanning science fiction, horror, and alternate history. A hero who once helped repel an alien invasion, ruined by self-doubt after his bruising experiences in the eye of the media, must try to save the world all over again. Best-selling author Philip K. Dick confronts Richard Nixon and a conspiracy that has taken control of America. A book dealer discovers strange and dangerous rivals on the far side of the internet. A science-fiction fan explains why he became a serial killer. And in 'Cross Roads Blues', the course of American history hangs on the decision of an itinerant musician.

Our Fictionless Futures

2011-05-22T17:47:00.005+01:00

Last week, my editor at Gollancz, Simon Spanton, asked a question on Twitter: ‘Can anyone think of an SFnal future that has an explicit reference in it to that future's own SF?’ A few of us responded, mostly referencing alternate history novels nested within alternate history novels; it was Malcolm Edwards who pointed out that Vernor Vinge’s Tatja Grimm’s World featured a mobile publishing house that, as it turned from producing fantasy to science fiction, helped to bootstrap its own civilisation. Tatja Grimm’s World was first published in 1969. More than forty years later, examples of science fiction in fictional futures are still rare.

As Walter John Williams pointed out in his blog, just a month earlier, ‘For almost the entire history of science fiction, the one thing you would never find in a science fiction novel was, well, science fiction. Every person in a science fiction story behaved as if science fiction itself was never invented.’ There are a fair few depictions of science-fiction novelists in science fiction set in the present: Kurt Vonnegut’s recurring character, the hack SF author Kilgore Trout, is probably the best known example; in Barry Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, an SF author finds himself in his imaginary future; an SF author tours and escapes Hell in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno; a failed SF author, after surviving burial by remaindered copies of his novel during an earthquake, helps save a remnant of humanity in the disasterous disaster flick 2012 (although more by his driving skills than any deep knowledge of SF tropes); the hero of Walter John William’s cyber-thrillers This Is Not A Game and Deep State is not only a former SF writer but also an RPG gamer. And so on.

But in the futures it has made its own, SF itself appears to have died out. Worse, the novel itself appears to have died out, too. There are poets (Rydra Wong in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17; the Kid in Dahlgren); musicians (the touring orchestra in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness; the discorporating singers in Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song; any number of revived/cloned rock stars); painters (the evolving robot artist in Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Zima Blue’); and sculptors (J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’), but precious few far-future novelists. The only one I can call to mind is Katin Crawford, the moon-fixated perpetual student in Delany’s Nova, who wants to revive the lost art of the novel and after endless false starts finds his subject matter in the adventure on which he embarks, and writes the novel you, the reader, hold in your hand (although doesn’t that make it a memoir?). I’m sure there are other examples, but on the whole, writers of fiction about the future don’t believe that written fiction will survive into the future, even as eBooks. In The Quiet War, I hinted that novels had been rolled up into immersive role-playing sagas, but even RPGs and their descendants may have a limited shelf-life: Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut novel, The Quantum Thief, features an obscure cult that’s preserved otherwise forgotten archaic computer games. It seems that as far as SF writers are concerned, the future is inimical to fiction of any kind ...

Starships

2011-05-21T00:07:00.002+01:00

I've been thinking about Luca Zanier's fantastic series of photographs of places of power ever since I came across them, via Mrs Deane. With their hyperrealistic lighting and perfectly framed compositions, they look like outtakes from unmade or unknown Kubrick movies. They also look like, I've just realised, starship control rooms.

Changing course in a starship would be a rare, momentous, and potentially catastrophic action. Everyone aboard would participate - if only to watch. There would be no need for panels with buttons and blinking lights. The 23rd Century equivalent of iPads would take care of that. But one thing Star Trek definitely got right: you'd need a space where people could gather to discuss what to do, and to watch the biggest and best HDTV screen you could buy. Of course, any reality-based starship design would probably be a compact tincan stuffed with AI, genetic codes, and templates for machines that could build machines that could build habitats and creches (or bigger, better AIs). But in an ideal imaginary case, there'd be something this:

A Sense Of Yearning For A Future That We All Knew Would Never Come To Pass

2011-05-16T17:43:00.001+01:00

My interest in pop music came late in my teenage years, long after I began to devour every SF novel I could find. We had more books than singles or LPs in the house: the singles were my sisters, the LPs my mother’s small collection of film soundtracks. My grandmother, who lived next door in the 1930s, had an old windup 78 player set in a cabinet, with one of those recurved horns that acted as a loudspeaker. There was Top of the Pops, which everyone seemed to watch in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the enforced jolliness and restricted playlist of Radio 1, and the pirate radio stations my sister chased across the dial of our radiogram, and that was about it until one day in 1972 I bought my first LP: David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders for Mars (I still have it). It was SF; it was a concept album with a proper narrative arc; I played it to death.

I’m still a fan of Bowie. Bowie in his 70's pomp, at least. And every since Jack Womack pointed me to it, I’ve been following the track by track story of his career on the blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame. It recently reached one of my all-time favourite Bowie songs, “Heroes”, anatomising both the song and the circumstances of its creation in wonderfully acute detail. Even if you’re not especially interested in “Heroes”, or David Bowie, it’s worth reading for its insights into the creative process. Here’s the important stuff that’s often left out of creative writing courses. Starting from scraps of discarded material. Pulling the structure together using a mixture of technique and improvisation and use of found material. Finishing it in a final burst of inspiration (or desperation). All of this at least as important as any planning; all of it following instinct rather than agreement on what's allowable. Sure, studio recording is a collaborative effort, but Bowie is at the centre, and very often, especially during the Long March of writing a novel, even before your editor becomes involved, isn't writing is a collaboration - a dialogue with your past selves?

Robert Johnson

2011-05-08T12:25:00.007+01:00

Today marks the centenary of the birth of the great, late bluesman, Robert Johnson. Or at least, the best guess of when his birthday was, for his life is poorly documented, like those of many African-Americans born in segregated Mississippi, and it is also overshadowed by myth. Thanks to Mack MacCormick and other researchers, we know that Johnson's family was split up when his father had to flee a lynch mob after becoming embroiled in a property dispute with white landowners. After his mother died when he was still young, Johnson left his wife and the child he fathered with another woman, and became one of the many musicians wandering the high roads, low roads, and railroads of 1930s America. Early in his career, he latched onto Son House, who recalled that Johnson was an awful guitar player who disappeared for a short spell and returned as a fully-fledged musician, so starting the legend that he'd learned his licks from the devil, either at first-hand, or via one of his tutors, Ike Zimmerman. Johnson died at the age of 27, from drinking poisoned whiskey supplied by a jealous husband, and soon after cutting 41 tracks that were reissued on two LPS by Columbia Records during the folk music revival of the early 1960s. He died in relative obscurity (even the site of his grave is disputed), and he had little influence on his contemporaries. But via those two Columbia Records LPs, his guitar playing and singing influenced many British musicians, including Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, Fleetwood Mac, and the Rolling Stones, and their music fed back into the US music scene. Johnson is renowned as an innovator and early pioneer of rock and roll. A 2CD compilation, The Complete Recordings, was issued in 1990, won a Grammy; four of his songs are included in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame; The Complete Recordings has been deposited in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

My own small tribute is a story I published early in my career, and republished in revised form in Little Machines. It imagines a time-travelling historian becoming embedded the story he's been sent to research, and creating an alternate world in which Robert Johnson died just before his music was properly recognised in a concert in New York City: an unkinder world which is our own. Here's the beginning:

The first time Turner heard Robert Johnson play was to a vast crowd in Washington, D.C., December 5th 1945, the night the desegregation bill went through, and just three weeks before Johnson was assassinated. The second time was on what was supposed to be a routine archive trip, June 3rd 1937, a jook joint just outside the little Mississippi town of Tallula, and it was something else.

Afterwards, Turner hung around outside, an anonymous still point in the crowd that, slow as molasses, dispersed into the hot dark night. The music still thrilled in his blood. Songs he’d had known only as ghosts in the crackle of a few badly worn 78s or no more than titles in charred files from the fire-bombed office of an obscure record company had one after the other ripped through the heat and noise of the crowded jook joint, so much sound from one man and one guitar, driving the whoops and pounding feet of the dancers, that Turner doubted his state-of-the-art Soviet recorder had been able to capture one tenth of the reality.

Turner had once played a little guitar himself, enough to know that what the old bluesmen said about Robert Johnson was true. Even before the New York concerts, the years in prison on a trumped-up murder charge, his letters and his protest songs, the Freedom Marches and he Segregation Riots, near-canonization after his assassination, he had been the best of them all. The hard little capsule planted under the skin beneath Turner’s collarbone, where the grain of Americium hung suspended in its Oppenheimer pinch, tingled. He should have cut out and closed the Loop when Robert Johnson had finished his set. Get in, do the job, get out. Don't give the paradoxes any chance. But Turner had heard raw truths in Johnson's songs; for the first time since he'd been brought home after the Peace Corps had been disbanded, he felt alive again. Before he closed the Loop, he wanted to meet the man whose music had cut him deep.

The sandy yard and dark road in front of the jook joint were empty now; only Turner and three men sitting on the sagging porch were left. The men, all in various degrees of drunkenness, were passing around a chipped enamel jug in the yellow light of a couple of kerosene lanterns, talking in low voices and glancing sidelong at the stranger in the dark suit it hung oddly around Turner, and the suspenders which held up the trousers were gouging his clean white shirt (soaked in sweat), and polished two-tone shoes (which pinched like hell). He strolled over to them, casual as he could, wondering if one of them was the man whose recollections about Robert Johnson, told to a field researcher in some twenty years time, had brought him here. His pulse in his throat, his mouth dry, he asked where Robert Johnson was.
One of them said, "He out back somewhere."
Another added, "With a woman. Comes to women, Bobby Johnson's like a snake in a henhouse."
The third wanted to know who was asking. Turner gave his cover story of being a talent scout, named a large New York record company. It was sort of true.
The man, burly and barechested under bib overalls, fixed a mean look on Turner. "Never heard of no gentleman of colour working for no record company before."
"Bobby Johnson, he already done got himself a deal," the first man said. He was the oldest of the three, his face a map of wrinkles like drying mud, his eyeballs yellow as ivory,his nappy hair salt and pepper. He peered at Turner and said, "You got yourself seventy-five, Mr New York, you can walk into Mr Willis’s dry goods store tomorrow and buy a record of his ‘Terraplane Blues’."
The second man, skinny and mournful, said, "I heard he been on the radio in Detroit, singin spirituals. Shit, he been round this country a couple three times now."
"Race records are a big thing in New York," Turner said, already in deeper than he'd intended. "That’s why we’re very interested in Robert Johnson."
"What they know bout the blues in New York?" the old man said. "You go tell your boss that down here is the rightful home of the blues, no place else. Why, I play harmonica myself. I get the blues real bad sometimes."
The mournful man said, "Bobby Johnson, he got 'em worse of all."
"He got a mojo hand, no mistake," the old man said, and drank from the enamel jug and smacked his lips.
"They say ol Legba gave the boy a lesson in the blues, in exchange for his soul," the mournful man said, and there was a hush as if an angel had passed overhead.
The old man took another drink and said, "Well I don't know if that be true, but I do know one time Bobby Johnson couldn't play a lick to save himself. I got the story straight from Son House. Bobby Johnson, he could play harmonica right enough, but he was always fixin after playin gitar. Hung out every joint and dance and country picnic there was, pesterin the players to give him a chance, but he was so bad it wasn't even funny. Anyway, he went away maybe a year, and I don't know if he went to the crossroads with Legba or not, but Son House told me when he came back he was carryin a gitar, and asked for a spot like old times. Well, Son was about ready to take a break, and told Bobby Johnson to go ahead and got himself outside before the boy began. But that time it was all changed. That time, he tol me, the music he heard Bobby Johnson make put the hair on his head to standin."
It had the air of a story told many times. There was a silence, and then the mournful man said, "He near to burnt down the place tonight, and that's the truth."
The old man said, "Son House tol me Bobby Johnson tol him a man called Ike Zimmerman taught him how to play, but what truth's in that I don't rightly know."
Turner, whose first name was Isaac, felt an airy thrill.
The burly man in the bib coveralls hauled himself to his feet, using as a support one of the posts that propped up the corrugated tin roof that sloped above the porch. He pointed at Turner and said, "You fools tell this stranger whatever’s on your minds, an you don’t know who he is."
"He tol you he scouting talent, Jake," the old man said. He told Turner, "You come on down to Mr Willis’s dry goods store tomorrow, Mister New York, I show you stuff on the harmonica you ain’t never before heard."
"He ain’t no scout," the burly man said. "He got the look of the law about him."
He came down the steps towards Turner, a mean glint in his eyes.
"I’m just passing through," Turner said, and raised his hand to his chest, ready to collapse the Oppenheimer Pinch if he had to.
"Don’t pull no gun on me," the burly man said, half-angry, half-fearful, and swung clumsily at Turner and turned halfway around at sat down with comic suddeness.
The door of the jook joint opened. Yellow light fell across the yard. A slightly-built man in a chalk-stripe suit stepped out, a guitar slung across his back, a fedora tilted on his head. It was Robert Johnson. He looked directly at Turner and said, "Why, Isaac. You come back. I always wondered if you would."

Coming Soon

2011-05-07T13:38:00.001+01:00

Coming to Kindle next month...

Table of Contents:

The Two Dicks
Residuals
17
All Tomorrow's Parties
Interstial
How We Lost the Moon,
A True Story by Frank W. Allen
Under Mars
Danger: Hard Hack Area
The Madness of Crowds
The Secret of My Success
The Proxy
I Spy
The Rift
Alien TV
Before The Flood
A Very British History
Cross Roads Blues

EDIT: Every eBook needs a good cover. This one is by Michael Marshall Smith

How It Works For Me

2011-04-29T09:35:00.000+01:00

Story develops from character and situation. Narrative and theme develops from story.

Clickety-Clack

2011-04-28T20:15:00.002+01:00

I was chatting with Jon Courtenay-Grimwood last night, after the Clarke Awards, and we got onto the topic of switching from typewriters to word processing, and how it changed our work habits. Amongst other things, we both retyped final draft pages if we made more than five mistakes when using a typewriter, and we both wrote to the end of the page at the end of a work session; if this meant stopping in the middle of a sentence, then we wrote the end of the sentence on a scrap of paper and the next day inserted a fresh sheet of paper in the machine and carried on from there. I doubt that anyone, now, reaches their self-assigned word (rather than page) count and stops dead in the middle of a sentence. You just keep going, chasing that blinking cursor across the screen. And if you're in the middle of a particular juicy and exciting scene or section, there's a temptation to keep going until the end - which means that the next day you have to cold-start the next scene from the very beginning, and risk getting blocked. Always leave something you want to write for the next day.

I have a small nostalgia for the steady clickety-clack* of the keys imprinting thoughts onto paper letter by letter, but none at all for the messy task of ribbon-changing, of having to stop to disentangle keys that jammed together because I was typing too fast, or of waiting for a streak of Tip-Ex to dry. And I never was (nor am I yet) a touch-typist. As soon as personal computers became affordable, I bought one, learned how to use WordPerfect 4.2, and never looked back.

The mechanical, linear process of typewriting meant that serious revisions were left until the draft was completed. Now, of course, you can worry away forever at what you've just written, and the changes are writ on water instead of paper. The process is a lot more playful than it once was, takes place on the screen as well as inside your head, and is kind of . . . indefinite. When you typed the final word of a manuscript and ripped the paper from the typewriter's platten, there was a real sense of completion, albeit momentary. For even in the days of typewritten MSS, there was a nagging feeling that there were still changes that needed to be made once the story or novel had made it, after editing, copy-editing and proofing, into print. That sense is perhaps a little stronger now. Unless you print it out straight away, there's a temptation to go back time and again to a word-processed document: to tweak and fiddle and adjust this or that sentence, to endlessly fine-tune. Nothing is ever really finished. Instead, you have to let it go.

Which brings me to the ongoing novel, which has now about three-quarters finished in first draft, and has reached the point where, rather than start to tie everything up and aim it towards the last sentence (I do know what it is), I have the growing urge to start over, change everything that needs fixing or revision, and cut away all the persiflage. As usual, I didn't discover the theme of the novel until it had progressed a fair way. The plot has grown far too complicated, as I followed all kinds of exciting leads. And just the other day, I realised that I'm missing a whole section that really needs to be included, and not just because it will contain some cool stuff about the fate of Earth, a chiliastic crusade, and involve the hero in some difficult moral decisions. Well, it can be dropped in later. Right now, this thing, like a shark, needs to keep moving forward. That imperative hasn't changed, at least.

*(UPDATE) Of course, the keys really went clack clack clack, but (this isn't an original thought; I can't remember who said it) the human mind imposes a narrative on everything, turning the steady tick tick tick tick of a clock into a time-directional tick tock tick tock. Does Chinese water torture work because the intervals between drips are just long enough to prevent the subject imposing a tick-tock narrative? Does the lack of coherent narrative drive us crazy?

(A)temporality

2011-04-25T13:41:00.001+01:00

The London Underground is an old system. Its pioneer and prime mover was born in the eighteenth century. The system itself was built before the unification of Italy and before the creation of Germany. Its first travellers wore top hats and frock-coats; there are early photographs of horse-drawn hansom cabs parked outside the underground stations. Oscar Wilde was a commuter on these subterranean trains, travelling from Sloane Square station to his office on Woman's World at the bottom of Ludgate Hill. Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin could both have used the Underground. The coffins of William Gladstone and Dr Barnardo were both transported beneath the earth in funereal underground trains. Jack the Ripper could have travelled on the Underground to Whitechapel: the station was served by the East London Railway.

Peter Ackroyd, London Under

Gollancz SF At Fifty

2011-04-21T20:12:00.001+01:00

Victor Gollancz Ltd, founded in 1927, started publishing science fiction and fantasy in 1961. Many will, like me, remember hunting down Gollancz hardbacks with their distinctive yellow jackets in library SF & Fantasy shelves in the 1970s and 1980s. The family firm of Gollancz was sold by Victor Gollancz's daughter, Livia, to Houghton Mifflin at the end of the 1980s. A few years later, Houghton Mifflin sold Gollancz to Cassell, which was bought by Orion in 1998; the Gollancz name lives on as its SF and Fantasy imprint. And now Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy is having a little contest to celebrate its anniversary. Pick what you consider to be the best title from 25 SF and and 25 fantasy books published by Gollancz, and you might win a subscription to SFX magazine, and a copy of each of the top 10 titles from both lists. And gosh, my novel Fairyland is up there in the best SF list...

Fairyland was my sixth book with Gollancz. My first, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published 23 years ago, in, yes, a yellow jacket, when Gollancz was still independent publisher Victor Gollancz. My editor was Malcolm Edwards, and I still remember our first meeting. Gollancz was housed in a Georgian building with a tall narrow frontage on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. (Later, I would discover that the company owned the property backing on to the townhouse, creating a Dickensian maze of offices and corridors and odd spaces that ran through the block (was there a courtyard? Were there clerks making entries in ledgers with quill pens?) to the next street.)

As I recall on that first visit, the reception wasn't a place to linger. No comfy sofas, coffee tables, vases of cut flowers. There were piles of books wrapped in brown paper and a couple of motorcycle dispatch riders kicking around the small, dimly lit room. The receptionist, working behind a counter, directed me upstairs. All the way up to the top, several floors of winding rickety stairs to a kind of penthouse with a lot of glass looking out over London rooftops, where Malcolm presided with unflappable affability over his first empire. He moved on just before Gollancz was swallowed by Houghton Mifflin; I stuck it out until just before Cassell, and Gollancz, was bought by Orion, under the direction of . . . Malcolm Edwards. It's a small world. Now I'm back with Gollancz, and my old titles have or are coming back into print, and I'm working on my nineteeth novel. Twenty-three years. As Matty Ross says towards the end of True Grit, time just gets away from us.

From My Red Left Hand

2011-04-13T18:19:00.003+01:00

I'm pleased that most commentators took my previous post in the satirical spirit in which it was intended. It's true, as Ilya2 remarked that you can find no (or hardly any) SF novels written after the 1980s entirely constructed from cliches, but plenty of movies (movie directors and producers are always about thirty years behind the bleeding edge of written SF, perhaps because they are inspired by the SF they read in their childhoods). But as others point out, these kind of cliches do keep recurring. The problem with cliches is they're strange attractors. They're the first thing you think of when constructing a scene or a scenario. They're seductively simple to use. The trick is to turn them upside down and take them apart and put them back together in a new an interesting way. Make it bigger and noiser. Go back to the reality, instead of a blurred fourth-generation photocopy. Or do something else instead. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to construct similar very short novels out cliches mined from fantasy, horror, literary and other genres. Or as per Lois Ava-Matthew's suggestion, to extend this one into a trilogy.

Onwards. Two of my horror short stories have been taken up for reprint inside a week. One, 'Inheritance', was my ninth published story, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction no less; it will appear in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, edited by Stephen Jones, and will be published by Ulysses Press in the autumn. The other, 'Take Me To the River', will appear in New Cthulu: The Recent Weird; edited by Paula Guran, it's due to be published by Prime Books in November.

I've always loved the horror genre; in the my formative years in the 1960s and early1970s, I read every one of Herbert van Thal's anthologies, tried to catch every Hammer film that appeared on TV, and was so thoroughly chilled by Jonathan Miller's TV adaptation of M.R. James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' that I chased down everything by James that I could find. Writing horror stories isn't merely an homage to these primal influences; it's also a kind of left-handed exercise that allows me to flex a different set of writing muscles. Most especially, it allows me to write something contemporary, and to draw on stuff from my life 'Take Me To The River', for instance, is set in Bristol - where I lived for seven years - during the long, hot summer of 1976, and recasts some of my experiences of the free festival scene.

Oh yes, here's the list of contributors to Paula Guran's anthology. I hope old H.P. would approve:

The Crevasse, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud
Old Virginia, Laird Barron
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear
Mongoose, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The Oram County Whoosit, Steve Duffy
Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Grinding Rock, Cody Goodfellow
Pickman's Other Model (1929), Caitlín Kiernan
The Disciple, David Barr Kirtley
The Vicar of R'lyeh, Marc Laidlaw
Mr Gaunt, John Langan
Take Me to the River, Paul McAuley
The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft, Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt
Details, China Miéville
Bringing Helena Back, Sarah Monette
Another Fish Story, Kim Newman
Lesser Demons, Norm Partridge
Cold Water Survival, Holly Phillips
Head Music, Lon Prater
Bad Sushi, Cherie Priest
The Fungal Stain, W.H. Pugmire
Tsathoggua, Michael Shea
Buried in the Sky, John Shirley
Fair Exchange, Michael Marshall Smith
The Essayist in the Wilderness, William Browning Spencer
A Colder War, Charles Stross
The Great White Bed, Don Webb

How To Write A Generic SF Novel

2011-04-04T19:58:00.001+01:00

Your hero must be likeable and sympathetic at all times. Like James Bond in the Roger Moore era, he’s quick with a quip, and is unruffled by any situation. No amount of exposure to suffering or slaughter should alter your hero in any significant way, although he is allowed to shed the odd manly tear or to express cold steely determination to do something about the death of a loved one. This makes him even more sympathetic. But all trauma is temporary; showing genuine emotion is difficult, and can hold up the plot. A secret past is always good -- you don’t have to deal with the parents. No bad deed goes unpunished; no good deed goes unrewarded; anyone who disagrees with your hero must suffer for it. Everyone’s behaviour has a rational explanation -- Freud is useful in this respect. No one refuses to get with the plot. Everyone acts their part, and is in character all the time. All problems are solvable. Traditionally, SF heroes solved problems by application of intelligence and scientific knowledge. These days, you can substitute lasers or AK-47s for scientific knowledge. Or swords. The equivalent of the internet or mobile phones are used only when the hero needs to find something out. Usually someone else does the actual typing. Don’t include any science that might frighten the readers. Anything found in SF written before the 1980s is usually okay. Nanotechnology is basically magic. So is genetic engineering. Also quantum mechanics. Virtual reality is more or less the same as a video game. Planets can be treated as a single country, with uniform climate and culture, and no more than three unique features that distinguish them from Earth. Always include some non-Americans for local colour; like the Irish steerage passengers in Titanic (the movie), they're cheerful, deferential, and possess a quaint and lively culture. Also include either a kickass woman who can do the unacceptable things that would make your hero unlikeable, or a wise old soothsaying woman who speaks in parables and knows things that can’t be found on the internet. See also: sidekick comedy robot. Infodumps can put off readers. Have your characters tell each other about their situation instead. Bars are good places to do this. Bars are also great places to meet people. Unlike airport bars, spaceport bars are packed with colourful characters who all know each other. Aliens can usually be found in the corners of spaceport bars, or in a mysterious rundown quarter of the city attached to the spaceport. They’re basically cats. Or turtles. Or some other pet animal. They often lack a sense of humour, which puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with humans. Interstellar merchants can be found in another corner of the bar, trading in spices, exotic liquors, and rare elements. No matter how technologically advanced your future society might be, its sociology and economics are basically those of the seventeenth century. Also its battle tactics. All spaceships are big. Very big. Except the one owned by the kickass woman. And they never run out of fuel, power, breathable air, potable water, food, or reaction mass. Despite possession of gigantic highly-advanced starships, wars are usually won by your hero and a few good marines. Death is optional. At the end, everything is as it was before, except your hero is richer, more powerful, and married to the right woman, who is never the kickass woman.
There’s your story.
Goodnight, children.

Another Day, Another Interview

2011-03-27T14:29:00.000+01:00

This one, over at the SFX blog, is short and sweet, answering some good questions from Tom Hunter on Fairyland, eBooks and more. Completely forgot to mention that I have a self-published eBook out, the novelete City of the Dead. Or that I'm planning to republish my short story collection, Little Machines (originally a limited edition hardback from PS Publishing), some time in summer. So now I've mentioned them here.

Supermoon/Magnolia/London

2011-03-20T17:19:00.000Z

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (10)

2011-03-19T14:15:00.002Z

In the middle of one of my favourite films, Wim Wender's Paris, Texas, the central character, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), has a strange encounter on a freeway overpass. Travis, who's been missing for four years, has been brought to Los Angeles by his brother Walt after wandering into a bar in the Texas badlands and collapsing. He slowly recovers his memory and is reintroduced to his young son, Hunter, who has been raised by Walt and his wife. When Travis decides that he has to find his estranged wife, he and Hunter leave together on a road trip back to Texas. The encounter happens just before they start off, during one of Travis's long, lonely walks:

It's as if Paris, Texas briefly intersects with another film - an SF disaster epic in which the unheeded warnings of a crazy man turn out to be prophetic. And yet it also fits in with the outsider view of America - the emptiness of its landscapes; the unceasing rush of its roads; the everyday surreality - that's so beautifully captured by Wenders and his cinematographer, Robbie Mueller. In that context, the idea of meeting a raggedy prophet of a science-fictional disaster is no stranger than, say, the shot in which the camera pans to reveal two giant dinosaurs in the parking lot of a truck stop in San Bernadino.

Interview

2011-03-15T16:49:00.016Z

New French magazine Yggdrasil recently interviewed me about The Quiet War for its forthcoming first issue. Here's the English version, by kind permission of editor Jean-Francois Micard, who asked the questions:

Yggdrasil: The Quiet War is a space opera situated in the near future and in our solar system. Was it important for you to stay close to the predictable reality?
Paul McAuley: It was important to stay close to known reality rather than predictable reality. I don’t believe that SF is in the prediction business. Instead, it should be exploring the vast range of possibilities that open up from signs and wonders in the present. As far as The Quiet War is concerned, I felt that it was important to stay close to known reality rather than predictable reality for two reasons. First, the novel was inspired in part by the images of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn sent back by the Viking 1 and 2, Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. By the tremendous variety of the landscapes of the moons, by the deep and strange histories implied by their forms, and by their sheer unexpected strangeness. By the subsurface ocean of Europa, the sulphur volcanoes of Io, the geysers of Enceladus, the vast equatorial mountain range of Iapetus, the lakes and dunes and cryovolcanoes of Titan, and much more. Second, I like to have a link between the present we all share and the futures of my various novels. It’s important to me - if not to the reader - to know how we might get from here to there.

In this future, the world supremacy switched to Brazil, which gave you an alternate point of view about the world. Do you think that after decades of European / US-led SF, the time is right for an SF that explores other areas of the world, like in The Quiet War, or Brazil or River of Gods from Ian McDonald for instance?
Futures in which Anglocentric late-stage capitalism are by no means the only possible futures. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. My first three novels shared a future history in which another version of a Greater Brazil became the dominant political force on Earth. But yes, the time is definitely right, now. The Cold War ended two decades ago. America is still the only world superpower, but China and India are catching up fast. And who knows how the democratic revolutions in the Middle East might revitalise Arabic culture?

Your work as a whole goes through a lot of settings, from space opera to techno-thriller, or even noir steampunk. Is it necessary for you to move through genres like this rather than settle in one and develop from there?
It’s necessary for me to write the book I want to write next. Commercially, it might have been better for my career if I had expanded the star-spanning space-opera future of my first three novels, but instead I wrote a novel about Mars, and then an alternate history involving Leonardo da Vinci. Because I’ve been interested in Mars for as long as I can remember (one of the first SF novels I ever read was HG Wells’ War of the Worlds); because I wanted to write a novel about Renaissance Florence. At one point I was pushed towards techno- thrillers, but the kind of techno-thriller I wrote were, typically for an SF writer, pro-science rather than Awful Warnings. I’m also an avid reader of crime novels, and when I was given the opportunity to write a crime novel I seized it. One day I’d like to write another. Meanwhile, I’m having a lot of fun with my new space opera future history.

You work for years as a scientist, and The Quiet War is full of very precise scientific details. Is it important for you to have this amount of accurate details?
Because I know a little about scientists and scientific culture, I try to get that right - especially as there aren’t that many novels about science, and scientists, even in SF, and it’s a big and important area of human endeavour. And because many of my SF novels are about how humans find ways of living in new landscapes, I like to get those details right, when the landscapes are real. I wanted, in The Quiet War, to get as close as possible to standing on the surface of Dione, or tramping through a riverine canyon on Titan. I wanted the experience in close up: what things look like, the way hills and craters were shaped, and so on. Along with travel writing, science fiction and fantasy are the last refuge of the pastoral.

Do you keep up to date personally with new scientific discoveries and theories?
I try. All SF writers should try keep up to date with that kind of thing, shouldn’t they? I follow developments in fields I am interested in, and I am also a big believer in serendipity - in the happy accident, in stumbling over something that fits into the narrative I happen to be constructing. The internet is very useful in that regard.

Sri Hong Owen and Averne are called (in French) sorcières génétiques. Do you think that, ultimately, science is akin to magic / witchcraft?
Not at all. The whole point of scientific experiments is that they can, in theory, be replicated by anyone. That’s why scientific papers can be dull and baffling to the layreader - they contain all kinds of detail required to make such replication possible. Science allows industrialisation and mass production because it defines predictable cause and effect based on shared observations and experiments. Magic on the other hand is personal. Every operator has different skills not shared by others, and every operation is as unique as a handwritten book.

Contrary to what a lot of people believe, you prove here than each moon has its own characteristics, and influence its settlers. When many writers just invent new world, do you take more pleasure in building them around accountable facts?
It’s much more satisfying, for me, to have a map. No matter how sketchy. The map does not of course contain every detail. It is not the territory it represents. But it provides a framework within which the imagination can work. Without that framework, when anything is possible, and while you might say that the imagination should be free to create anything it wants, if anything is possible then nothing is of any real value.

The Quiet War is about a war that doesn't have the fury of 'traditional' wars, it's mainly about micro-actions like sabotage and bacteria. Do you feel the wars of the future will have that dimension?
They’re already growing in that direction. 9/11. The stuxnet worm attacking the software that controls Iranian nuclear facilities. Drones. The idea of netwar - conflicts that are not controlled from the top down, like conventional armies, but are organised in all-channel networks.

It's not really a war in the traditional sense about territories and resources, but more about what kind of future wants humanity. It's also an exploration of different social/political/philosophical systems, Earth being settled in an ecological conservatism when the extraterrestrial colonies evolved into various social systems. Which one is your favourite?
The idea of city states in which every citizen has a share in the commons, and can influence the direction and development of their society by earning social value through good works is to me very appealing. And so is the idea that in the near future the human race will face up to what it has done to the Earth, and start to make amends. But in The Quiet War, the green movement has been hijacked by nondemocratic cabals and turned into an ideology that excuses all kinds of repression, so it wouldn’t be a very comfortable place to live. Although readers of both novels will find that things do change . . .

Each of the colonies are, in essence, an utopia. Is it harder to write about utopias rather than dystopias?
It’s much harder to write about uptopias because it’s hard to make them nteresting. If a place is perfect, and everyone is happy, what happens? Ordinary everyday human dramas, of course, and these are fine and enduring subjects for the novelist, but perfect utopias are fixed places. Nothing changes. Novels about them too often lapse into long descriptions of the plumbing system, and guided tours of the munipal steam creche and the balloon works. Fortunately, the cities and settlements of The Quiet War’s outer system are flawed utopias. They are tested by pressures from within and without, and the drama in the two novels is derived from how they resist those pressures, how they fail, how they adapt.

You began the novel as several short stories in that universe, do you plan to expand it beyond The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun? With other novels? Short stories?
I’ve just finished a novel called In The Mouth of the Whale, that extends the history of The Quiet War and the Gardens of the Sun across a leap of some twelve hundred years, and looks towards the history of the human species way beyond that. It’s set in the dust ring of Fomalhaut, and the atmosphere of a gas giant that’s believed to orbit that star. And right now I’m working on a novel set at about the same time as In The Mouth of the Whale, but in the Solar System.

Fairyland

2011-03-14T15:34:00.000Z

The Grand Staircase of the St Pancras Midland Grand Hotel, which is about to open after years of renovation. I have a tender spot for the place: it was the setting for the opening of my novel Fairyland, and very early on its hapless hero sweeps down this very staircase:

Gilbert Scott's great curving stair takes Alex down to the busy lobby. He shakes out his black, wide-brimmed hat (yeah, Oscar Wilde) and claps it onto his head, trying to look nonchalant despite the ball of acid cramping his stomach. A doorman in plum uniform and top hat opens a polished plate glass door and Alex walks out into bronze sunlight and the roar of traffic shuddering along Euston Road.

To the north, black rainclouds are boiling up, bunching and streaming as if on fast-forward. There's a charge in the air; everyone is walking quickly, despite the heavy heat. Every other person carries an umbrella. It's monsoon weather.

Fairyland was published sixteen years ago, while the hotel was still more or less a wreck (a great collection of pre-renovation photographs can be found here, showing what it looked like when I visited it, during a Christmas Art Fair, about a decade ago). Fifteen years ago, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award - the first but by no means the last Clarke Award success for my publisher, Gollancz. To celebrate the anniversary, and the e-publication of various of my backlist titles, including Fairyland, there's a bit of promotion going on at their site right now, complete with a competition. Adam Roberts has put up a generous and long review of Fairyland (first published in a book about Clarke Award winners) on his blog, and there'll be other stuff turning up here and there too, including a special Gollancz newsletter, and some kind of competition for free books right here on the blog, towards the end of this week.

Reference

2011-03-13T09:43:00.001Z

Via Talking Points Memo I came across a report of some crass eugenic-speak from a recently-elected New Hampshire State Representative, coupled with an unfortunate reference to a late SF author:

A 91-year-old freshman state representative has angered a Dover Community Partners staffer for his comments he doesn't support state funding for "the crazy people" who should be sent to "Siberia."...

Martin Harty of Barrington made the comments to Sharon Omand, a program manager at Community Partners, which provides behavioral health and developmental services for Strafford County. Omand had called Harty and other legislators to discuss measures in the proposed House Republican state budget that would make significant cuts to mental health services.

Omand told Foster's that Harty told her he disagreed with her about the need for funds for mental health services and he believed in eugenics.

"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," he told her.

Where does he get his ideas?

Explaining his thoughts, Harty said one of his main concerns is population explosion, and he is wary of funding a social issue that can't really be helped...

Harty referenced science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and his stories about a pending population explosion as someone whose messages he is "in tune with."

When I sent the link to a few usual suspects, Eileen Gunn pointed out that Harty was most likely channelling Cyril Kornbluth's satirical short story 'The Marching Morons', in which the US has become populated by lowbrows kept content by shoddy consumer goods and pointless jobs. In fact, Harty's idea about sending inverts Kornbluth's scenario: in 'The Marching Morons', the high-IQ elite have set up an Arctic retreat from the stresses of trying to run the US. As for Harty's claim of 'being in tune with' Asimov's messages about the population explosion, I really don't think so. Asimov, ever the rationalist, believed that the solution to over-population lay in promoting voluntary contraception, encouraging homosexuality, and world government. Not, I think, the typical views of a Republican - even of the New Hampshire variety.

Question - I have a vague memory, exclusive of title and author, of a short story in which criminals were sent to a walled territory to do as they would. Anyone know anything about this? Or of any SF scenario, apart from HG Wells' 'The Country of the Blind' or John Varley's 'The Persistence of Vision' where the differently-abled have either volunteered for, or have been driven into, exile?

In The Mouth Of The Whale

2011-03-03T17:03:00.006Z

My agent has just delivered the manuscript of my next novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, to Gollancz, so I thought I'd put up an extract:

It began like every other day. Ori climbed into her immersion chair and plugged into her bot, trundled it out onto the skin of the Whale, and helped her crew shepherd a pair of probes from their garage to the staging post. Fuelling and charging them, running final checks before they set off on their long journey down the cable. Important, demanding, finicky work, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The staging post was near the base of the Whale’s vertical cylinder, at the lip of the conical end cap that tapered to the cable’s insertion point. Immediately above, a marshalling yard spread like ivy around a tree trunk, bustling with purposeful movement. At the upper end, hoppers stuffed with a variety of raw construction materials scooted down rack and pinion tracks towards tipplers that seized and lifted them up and turned them upside down and mated their hatches with the hatches of bulbous freight cars. The hoppers shed their cargo with quick peristaltic shudders, were swung right side up and set down on return tracks on the far side of the tipplers, and zipped back to the refinery. Further down the yard, loaded freight cars assembled themselves into long strings that trundled away along one of the four parallel magrails that crossed the inverted hill of the end cap and converged on the cable, the strings rolling over flying bridges at the insertion point and gathering speed as they descended the cable towards the deck of fluffy white ammonia clouds that sheeted the sky from horizon to horizon, passing strings of empty cars climbing in the opposite direction. More here...

Learning To Love The Alien

2011-03-02T17:50:00.001Z

It's one of the chief signifiers of science fiction, the other, the alien, but in literary sf at least, it's a signifier that's fallen out of favour. There are still plenty of aliens in turning up in TV and film sf, and some even escape the cliches of messiah, seemingly unstoppable menace (until they catch a cold or get 419'd), or comedy sidekick. But in literary sf, at least on this side of the Atlantic, where we don't have a tradition of military sf and the need for ravening hordes of easy targets, not so much. Oh, there have been a few, of course. Even some good ones, such as the bleakly inimical gene machines in Peter Watts' Blindsight, or the cruel and elegantly wasted aristocrats in Gwyneth Jones's Spirit. But on the whole, they've fallen out of fashion. My first three novels are a case in point. In Four Hundred Billion Stars, aliens were a tangible presence; a puzzle to be confronted and solved. In Secret Harmonies (aka Of The Fall, in the US), they were admonitory presences that may or may not have been intelligent, and died if human beings hung around them for too long. And in Eternal Light, they'd quit the universe, become as untouchable and about as understandable as angels.

After that, I more or less gave up on the alien business for the next fifteen years, but now I'm giving it serious thought again. It started with a short story, 'Dust', and grew from there into what's more of a scenario than any kind of future history. Just suppose we get one of the things we always thought we'd get in the future, back when the future was still a good place to be travelling towards. Suppose we get easy travel to other planets, right now. Suppose it's a gift from aliens who want to give us a helping hand. It isn't much of a gift - a few cold and dusty and barely habitable planets littered with ancient and mostly useless artifacts, but hey. What do we do with it? How would it change us? Would it change us?

I've been writing a few stories to explore the edges of this frame, but now I'm beginning to think that, after the next novel, I need to go a bit deeper. I need to take a good look at those aliens. What do they want? What are they? Not monsters from our ids, or distorted reflections of ourselves (or of our pets), that's for sure. Maybe in the end they're what they've always been - an articulation of the inhumanness of the universe. Or maybe they are their own selves, just as we are. I think it might be fun to find out.

Meanwhile, just to remind you, you can find one of those stories in my new ebook, City of the Dead.

Debatable Zones

2011-02-27T10:43:00.002Z

As an exercise, the reader might like to substitute 'science fiction' and 'sf writers' for 'poetry' and 'poets' in the following:

The edgelands are a complex landscape, a debatable zone, constantly reinventing themselves as economic and social tides come in and out. Of course, the idea of edgelands does not just refer to parts of the physical landscape. It's a rich term for poetry, too, and can maybe break down other dualities. Poets have always been attracted to the overlooked, the telling details, the captured moment. And the moment is important here, too. If parts of remote rural Britain feel timeless (though this feeling is, of course, illusory) then the edgelands feel anything but. Revisit an edgelands site you haven't seen for six months, and likely as not there will be a Victorian factory knocked down, a business park newly built, a section of waste ground cleared and landscaped, a re-war warehouse abandoned and open to the elements [or a Zeppelin factory swarming with zombies - PM]. Such are the constantly shifting sands of edgelands that any writing about these landscapes is a snapshot. There is no definitive description of the edgelands of Swindon, or Wolverhampton, only an attempt to celebrate and evoke them at one particular time.

Edgelands: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

Books Do Furnish A Room

2011-02-25T17:52:00.002Z

Rereading

2011-02-24T18:06:00.000Z

So SFSignal asked me: What books/stories do you feel are just as good now as they were when you first read them?

My answer below; answers from other people here.

Any book worth its salt should be able to withstand a second reading, but there are some that excite and move me at every reencounter. Here are a few:

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. A man finds himself stranded on a traffic island after a car crash. At first he can’t escape. And then he doesn’t want to. A powerful, deceptively simple updating of the Robinson Crusoe story.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. A man comes to a wounded American city, leaves as a hero-poet. After the fall of New Orleans, it’s more relevant than ever.

Libra by Don DeLillo. Oswald as tragic hero.

Neuromancer by William Gibson. Still fresh and startlingly original, despite a thousand imitators.

The Inheritors by William Golding. Neanderthals encounter modern humans, with fatal results. All of Golding is worth reading and rereading, but this is my favourite.

Climbers by M. John Harrison. A beautifully written, intricately structured memoir/novel about memory, obsession, and the unrelenting reality of the world.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Diagrammatic, yes, but the sections set on Anarres are truly powerful and moving, and it’s one of the few SF novels to attempt to portray a genuinely original society from the inside.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. America primeval.

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. Alyx, a barbarian kidnapped by the future, leads a gang of squabbling tourists across an alien wilderness. Alyx is the template for every wisecracking kickass heroine in cyberpunk, the new space opera and much else, but she’s the original and best, tough and funny and tender and wise.

Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. The detailed life and times of Updike’s American Everyman are, like America itself, inexhaustible.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White. A marvellously eccentric fantasy about King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Matter of Britain that begins as a juvenile comedy and ends in tragedy and renewal. The death of Beaumont gets me every time. And no one does infodumps like White, who seems to know everything about Medieval Britain, which he remakes into a world that never was but should have been.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. The fall of America, as told to her diary by a young girl. The best, and chronologically the first, of Womack’s Ambient sequence.

So, which books do you recommend?