Public Service Announcement

Some may call this Hugo Award pimpage, and maybe it is, but I'd like to suggest that I'm doing the SF community a service.

It's that time of year when nominations for Hugos are made, and I want to ask people who are able to vote - people who attended last year's WorldCon in Montreal, and supporting and attending members of this year's WorldCon in Melbourne - to vote for one of my novels. You see, I've never been on the short list for a fiction Hugo. Oh, my pal Kim Newman and I were shortlisted for the Hugo for best dramatic presentation, short-form, for our presentation of the Hugo ceremony in 2005, but none of my fiction has ever been shortlisted for a Hugo. And that's a shame.

Not for me, you understand. I can live with it. But listen: the fact that I haven't been shortlisted for a fiction award reflects badly on all the great authors who've never been shortlisted for a fiction Hugo either. People like J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Lester Del Rey, M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, Tim Powers, Peter Straub, AE van Vogt. I mean, think about it. I really don't deserve to be in their company.

So listen up. Here's what can be done to remedy this terribly embarrassing situation. I have it on good authority that because it wasn't published in the USA until 2009 and because it didn't make the short list last year, the eligibility extension bylaw of the Hugo Awards allows my novel The Quiet War to be eligible for nomination for best novel in this year's Hugo Awards. So if you liked it enough to nominate it last year, please, think about doing so again. And if you've read it and liked it, but haven't yet nominated it, why not give it a shot? You could also nominate Gardens of the Sun, too, of course. Just in case.

I know that my continued failure to be shortlisted is an amazing honour. But really, I'm not worthy.

PS This novella is eligible too.

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Exozoo

I really do like this list of the top fifteen fascinating exoplanets an awful lot. Not only for the pretty pictures (although they are awfully seductive) and the neatly encapsulated biographies (although they do contain some neat and startling stuff), but also because it shows how much we've learned since the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasus b, aka Bellerophon, was detected in 1995. As of this date, we know of some 429 extrasolar planets. They orbit main sequence stars, red dwarfs, binary stars, pulsars. We know of several stars with more than one planet - solar systems like our own. Most are the size of Jupiter and many orbit close to their parent star, but that's not surprising, given that current detection techniques favour finding that kind of planet. But as the list shows, there's enough variety to begin to create a rudimentary taxonomy of planets in other solar systems, and to understand how they formed and what they might look like.

And I'm especially interested in that, because I'm writing a novel set in and around planets of a particular nearby star, and I'd much rather have some data to ground my speculations than make up stuff out of whole cloth. When I started reading SF, in the 1960s, there were an awful lot of stories set on alien planets, but the planets were all much the same. They were all mostly habitable, all mostly extreme variations on Earth's geographical, climatological and ecological features; only a few writers, notably Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, and Larry Niven, tried to create wholly exotic yet believable alien worlds. It's a very different game now.

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Something Old

(I'm trying to ramp up the first draft of a new novel right now. So in lieu of a post on e-books, which I haven't had the time to finish, here's a brief note on a Soviet-era SF novel, originally published in F&SF.)

Sannikov Land by Vladimir Obruchev, 1926.

If you like lost world novels, I guarantee that this obscure Russian classic will press all your buttons. There are encounters with prehistoric megafauna, beautiful and willing savage women, war between stone-age tribes, weird shamanistic rites, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and a boy's own enthusiasm for bagging big game. It's true that the characters are indistinguishably wooden mouthpieces for the author's opinions and the plot is pure pulp, but those faults are redeemed by the novel's rigorous scientific sensibility.

Obruchev was a geologist and academician, high in the former USSR's scientific hierarchy (amongst other things he had a mineral, a mountain, and a crater on the Moon named after him). His descriptions of the harsh beauty of the Russian Arctic Circle, and of the privations experienced by his explorers, are crammed with telling detail; given the abundance of frozen mammoths in Siberia, one suspects that he may have been drawing on experience when recommending roast mammoth trunk as a particular delicacy. There are lyrical infodumps about geology and prehistoric fauna; the lost land, nestled in a vast Arctic volcano, is drawn with evocative vermisilitude.

Sannikov Land has been long out-of-print -- the edition I have is an English translation published in 1955 by the Foreign Languages Publishing Association of Moscow -- and as one of a series of 'Soviet Literature for Young People', it was a small part of the former USSR's Cold War arsenal. When it was published, it was probably illegal, or at least ever-so slightly dangerous, to own it in the USA, so it may be hard to find. But believe me, the search will be worthwhile. I'm off to look for Obruchev's other scientific romance, Plutonia. It's a hollow-earth story, and I can't wait to read it.*

*I eventually tracked down a copy owned by China Mieville. He hadn't read Sannikov Land, so we made an equitable trade.

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Murderous George

(It's not really Werner Hertzog, of course, but it is a clever and very funny parody. To appreciate it properly, you probably need to have seen his documentary Grizzly Man, in which Hertzog contrasts his view of nature as grim, unreasoning and full of horror with the unbalanced optimism of the self-styled grizzly man, Timothy Treadwell, who was eaten by one of the bears he mistakenly believed he was protecting. Come to think of it, this isn't so much a parody: it's a hard SF version of the children's story.)

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My Books

As far as I’m concerned, a novel is finished when I type the last full stop of the last sentence of the last draft. But it’s also the beginning of another process. The manuscript goes off to the editor and comes back with suggestions for changes and corrections and fixes; when those have been dealt with, there’s the copy-editing and proofreading stages to go through. After that, the file goes off to the printers, where the novel becomes a mass-produced object. What was once a singular object is duplicated, multiplied. Turned into the books in the bookshops, and the warehouses of the internet merchants. The books in the hands of readers. And the complimentary copies that arrive at the author’s door in hefty courier boxes internally armoured with plastic membrane.

The complimentary copies arrive long after that final full stop was typed, and sometimes many years after the vague pricking of the first ideas that slowly grew, sentence by sentence, page by page, into the fully-fledged novel. The actual book seems to bear little relation to that solitary activity: the days and weeks and months spent alone in front of the computer screen or bent over a MSS, blemishing its crisp laser-printed pages with red ink. A time already receeding in memory, because I’m at work on my next novel, or at least, thinking about how to get started. The paper brick of the published book is like a memento or postcard from some half-remembered holiday of another lifetime.

And it also, despite the many drafts, the editing and copy-editing and proofreading, contains mistakes. Typographic errors, clumsy phrasing and factual goofs that will need to be corrected for the paperback and other editions. So at some point the thing has to be opened and read: a grim but necessary process.

Meanwhile, the book is out there, in the world. While I was writing it, I was in charge. But now it’s out of my control. It has a life of its own. It’s interrogated in reviews. I see copies in bookshops (and must supress the urge to turn it face out). Very occasionally I see a copy in the hands of a reader (and must supress the urge to introduce myself). I dedicate and sign copies at bookshop events and at conventions: I even make my mark in the dusty copies disinterred one by one from a suitcase or rucksack by dealers, who ask for ‘just the signature’. For the value of a book is increased by the presence of the author’s signature on the flyleaf: the signature that’s a personalising touch for readers who like or even love the book for what it contains - for its story and characters - also turns it into a fetish object for collectors of first editions.

First publication is not the end of the story of the book. Afterwards, there’s the mass-market paperback, and, over the years, a trickle of foreign editions and (sometimes) new editions from the original publisher. They mount up. Like many authors, I have shelves packed with my own books (none of them signed - do any authors sign their own copies of their own books?). And there are also the anthologies which contain one of my stories, and the books by other people, for which I’ve written an introduction . . . And I have extra copies of all of my books, too.


Most of each book’s first edition is given away, and so are some of the paperbacks. But what to do with the rest of the paperbacks, not to mention the complimentary copies of the American edition, and of the foreign reprints? Some are stacked under the bookshelves in my study, but that marginal space filled up long ago. Some are shelved in a cupboard, and the cupboard is also full. The rest are in boxes in my office, in other cupboards, at the bottom of wardrobes, under beds. It’s said that you can’t have too many books. But I’m beginning to think that I may have too many copies of my own books. Or maybe I need to board up the attic, and turn it into a book depository...

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Pirated

There's a lot of fuss about pirating scanned and electronic copies of books right now. And it's not an activity I condone. Sharing a book with friends is one thing; turning a profit on illigitimately obtained copies is quite another. But the image above is of a very special case of piracy involving one of my short stories.

Some ten years ago, the French newspaper Le Monde published as fold-out supplements several long science-fiction stories. One of them was mine: 'Second Skin'. A couple of months after it was published, I was invited to a small sf convention in France, and came across an entrepreneur selling for a few francs each little pamphlets he'd made up from those supplements. The pages are handcut and bound in handcut blue card, and pasted to the front were cutouts of what I assume is the advertisment for the supplement.

Strictly speaking, I suppose, it isn't a pirated edition. I'd already been paid for the reprint of the story. The entrepreneur had paid for copies of the newspaper, and enhanced the value of supplement. He turned a small profit from his labours and I received several copies of a unique artifact. Result: a small increase in human happiness.

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Blish

If history teaches us one thing, it’s that almost all authors writing now will be forgotten in a hundred years time, and even if their books linger in some vast long-tail electronic library, few will read them. Most authors, and most books, achieve obscurity far sooner than that, of course, but best-selling status is no guarantee of long-term survival. A hundred years ago, Marie Correlli was the most widely-read author of her time, so wealthy that she paid for restoration of many properties in her adopted home of Stratford-upon-Avon and imported a gondola and a gondolier from Venice, so that she could be poled about the Avon. But who now reads A Mighty Atom or The Sorrows of Satan?

Every author knows this, but most nuture a frail but stubborn fantasy that they’ll somehow dodge the bullet. Even those who don’t trouble the bestselling charts (ie most of us) hope that they will, like Herman Melville, who barely earned $10,000 from his books during his lifetime, achieve posthumous recognition. A vain and foolish hope, of course, but apart from the very few pragmatic authors who write only to pay the electricity bill it’s one most cling to. So it’s always a salutary lesson to discover that a favourite writer is slipping away into obscurity, which brings me to one of my favourite science-fiction authors, James Blish.


I was a big fan of Blish’s work back when I was at the age where I read almost nothing but science fiction. My other abiding interest was science, especially the biological sciences, and Blish, who worked as a technician in an Army medical lab during the Second World War, and studied zoology at Columbia University, not only understood how scientists thought and worked, but was one of the first sf authors to tackle the ramifications of molecular biology, genetics, and Darwinian evolution. And he put his biological knowledge to good use when he invented the science of pantropy, the deliberate modification of the standard human form to adapt it to conditions on other planets, and one of the stories that explores its implications, ‘Surface Tension’ (collected in The Seedling Stars), is one of my all-time favourites, and in its description of an unlikely spaceship toiling from puddle to puddle on a bleak waterworld, contains one of my all-time moments of pure sense of wonder:

Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inch wooden spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope towards the drying little rivulet.

I also delighted in the kind of obscure knowledge that salted Blish’s fiction, no more so than in his novels about the release of Satan and his hordes from Hell, and the apocalyptic war that follows, Black Easter and The Day After Judgement, in which magic is treated as an exact science.

At that time, the early seventies, most of Blish’s work could be found in the library, or in paperback. He was one of the major shapers of modern science fiction, and one of the first sf writers with a strong interest in literature and modernism (he admired and championed the work of James Joyce, which is why I ended up reading Ulysses at age seventeen, and doing my best to read Finnegans Wake). He was one of the authors of science fiction’s so-called Golden Age. He joined the Futurians, a feisty group of New York sf fans whose other members included Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth, and Fredrik Pohl. He was a regular contributor to the pulps who amped up his game and wrote a series of stories about cities flying about the galaxy like pollinating bees that he stitched into a novel, Earthman, Come Home: the cornerstone of the Okie series, and a major influence on the revivalists of space opera in the 1990s. Another novel, A Case of Conscience, won the Hugo for best novel in 1959. Several of his short stories are regarded as classics; he was one of the first serious science fiction critics; and he wrote the first original Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die, and numerous novelisations of the original TV scripts. And so on, and so on.

But now, a little over thirty years after his death, almost all of his books have fallen out of print; only the Okie series, collected as Cities in Flight, is readily available. It’s true that Blish never quite shook off his pulp origins, that his plots are driven by hectic action and incident, that his characters - even the redoubtable Major Amalfi, of the flying Okie city of New York, New York - aren’t as fully rounded as they should be, and tend to lapse into comic- book cliche. And it’s also true that his work could sometimes be acerbic and chilly, and that he didn’t wear his learning lightly, had no time for popular culture (he dismissed pop music as ‘Beatles and other Coleoptera’), and suffered a fall in the standard of his later work. But he doesn’t, I think, and not just because of the shiver of presentiment it engenders in me, deserve his present obscurity. Maybe in a few years, or ten, or a hundred, that will change.



Essential short stories:
‘A Work of Art’
‘Beep’
‘Common Time’
‘How Beautiful, With Banners’
‘Surface Tension’

Essential novels:
Jack of Eagles
Fallen Star

Cities in Flight:
They Shall Have Stars
A Life For the Stars
Earthman, Come Home
A Clash of Cymbals

After Such Knowledge:
Dr Mirabilis
A Case of Conscience
Black Easter
The Day After Judgement

UPDATE: NESFA Press, that haven of good deeds in a naughty world, have published two reprint collections of Blish's work, Flights of Eagles, and Works of Art.

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Research

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Influence

If influences catch you early in life, then I reckon I owe a good deal of my career to Burke Publishing Co, a London publishing firm so thoroughly vanished that I couldn't find them on Google (were they absorbed by one of the conglomerates, or did they just evaporate - does anyone know?). First, because they published Maguerite Desmurger's Stories From Greek History, one of the first books I owned. It was given to to me as the Vicar's Prize at my primary school (no big deal, this; there were only 40 children in the whole school, and sooner or later almost everyone of them won some kind of prize). I was nine. I still have it. And it's a lovely little book, retelling with wit and concision stories of Sparta and Croesus, the Medes and Persians, the Athenian philosphers, and Alexander the Great. It showed me that history wasn't a collection of dry facts, revealed the ancient world to be another country with its own customs and habits, and taught me how to shape a story, and how to use the telling detail. And in the story of Alexander, it introduced me to that classic trope, the tragic hero.


Burke also published Patrick Moore, the British amateur astronomer who has done more than anyone else in this country to popularise the science. His TV programme, The Sky at Night, was first broadcast in 1957 and he is still featured on it today; he was one of the BBC's commentators for the Apollo 11 moon landing; and he wrote juvenile science-fiction novels. And he was a prolific novelist. His first titles, beginning with The Master of the Moon (1952) were published by another long-lost outfit, the Hardback Museum Press, but Burke published the novels featuring his best-known hero, sixteen year old astronaut Maurice Grey (Mission to Mars, The Domes of Mars, The Voices of Mars, Raiders of Mars, Peril on Mars). I read them all, and everything else of Moore's that I could find in the local library. They are very old-fashioned (even for the 1950s and 1960s) tales of derring-do by upright British chaps, and the prose is at best serviceable, but they were, for their time, scientifically accurate and stirred in me the first feelings of that good old sense of wonder. How could I not resist something like this, the opening of Wanderer in Space?

It was full Earth. The brilliant, bluish radiance flooded down upon the bleak landscape of the moon, catching the tops of the crater-walls abd making the floors look like pools of ink; there were no half-lights, and everything was either brightly lit or else totally dark. The sky seemed ablaze with stars, shining steadily and without the slightest sign of twinkle.

By the way, the cover of Wanderer in Space is by well-known space artist David Hardy.

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Traction

Some authors blast through their first drafts as if they're taking dictation. Shakespeare famously never blotted his copybook. William Golding wrote the first draft of his Booker-winning novel Rites of Passage in a month (although this was a break from the long and arduous task of completing Darkness Visible). Other authors patiently accrete their novels one polished chapter at a time until they're done. That's not for me. I labour away at a first draft for months and months and then more or less rip it up and start again. Luckily, I love revising.

Although I did once write the first draft of a novel in a month. A chapter a day every day until it was done. At the time it was a straight crime novel, set in the area where I lived. I did it for fun, but as I was an SF writer I didn't have anywhere to place it and I also had other books to write: books I'd already been paid to write. But after that first draft had been sitting in a folder for a couple of years, my then publishers arm-wrestled me into writing near future thrillers because they wanted to get out of the (according to them) dead-end no-hope SF business. So I took out the MSS and spent six months completely revising it, transcribing its setting to a near future London half-wrecked by terrorism, and it was published as Whole Wide World on September 9th 2001. So it goes.

Right now, I'm in the first stages of first draft limbo, which follows on from a long and shapeless period in which I made scads of notes and did about a metric ton of aimless research. And then I threw most of the notes and the research away, but at least it let me know what the thing isn't about. After that, I spent a few weeks footling around, trying out this and that move, trying to find the first foot- and handholds on the long climb upward to the nirvana of the last page.

Now, I have a rough idea of the shape of the plot. I've a fix on two of the main characters and after a couple of weeks I think I've got an idea or two about the third. For one thing, I know now that he's a first-person narrator, which after several false starts came as something of a surprise. Still, as John Cheever used to tell his creative writing students, you can't just jump into first-person narration; it has to be earned. Ahead of me lie all kinds of false starts, dead-ends, pointless detours, horrible mistakes, and futile attempts to avoid the sucking pits of cliche. One thing I've learned from writing novels is that writing the next one isn't easier. Wouldn't have it any other way.

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Furnished Early In Books

It's a new year and a new decade (psychologically at least) so let's start over from the beginning. Here I am, aged three or thereabouts, being introduced to the world of books by my uncle (and also, if you look closely at his right hand, to cigarette smoking: the books took but the cigarettes didn't). Oh sure, it isn't the first book I encountered, but it's the first record of my book-addiction. I can't remember what that book is, and don't have the Bladerunner-style software to resolve the cover - is that a running dog, or the silhouette of a brontosaurus? Whatever it is, I'm fascinated by it. I'm hooked.

(It's summer 1958, in my grandmother's garden. More than fifty years ago. But the first commercial nuclear power station had begun operation in Britain two years before; it was a year after Francis Crick had laid out the 'central dogma' - the relationship between DNA, RNA, and proteins that underpins molecular biology - and the replication mechanism of DNA's double helix had just been confirmed by the Meselson-Stahl experiment; Christopher Cockerell had just unveiled the first hovercraft; there were more households owning TVs than radio-only households; IBM had just made its first computer; there were Russian and American satellites in orbit.

(In short, just as I was learning to enjoy and understand books, modernity was everywhere. It was only natural to grow up expecting aircars, unlimited electrical power, space stations, and moonbases to be just around the corner.)

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