Where I'm At

Some weeks later, with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass begins to revise TUH. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones. Before Mr Earbrass is through, at least one third of TUH will bear no resemblance to its original state.

Most novelists recognise something of themselves in the late great Edward Gorey's Mr Earbrass - written in 1953, The Unstrung Harp is still one of the funniest and truest descriptions of writing a novel. Revision isn't much easier with word processing, but I find it's a lot more fun than wrestling with the seemingly infinite snake of the first draft. I know now what my characters will and won't do, for instance. And it's a lot easier going along with what they want, than trying to push them in directions they don't like.

Meanwhile, I'm too distracted to do this blog much justice, but I'm still blurting out bits of nonsense over on Twitter. Uses a different part of the brain.

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Above Us Only Sky

When I was at primary school in Gloucestershire, in the early 1960s, it was still unusual to see a contrail in the sky. The charter air travel industry, which transplanted British seaside culture to the Mediterranean, was in its infancy; transatlantic flights hadn't yet been multiplied by the demands of mass tourism. Now, thanks to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, the empty skies of my childhood have returned. In a single spasm, Eyjafjallajökull punched a plume of fine ash some eight kilometres into the stratosphere, and winds have spread it across most of Europe. Planes are grounded because the ash cloud hangs at the height at which they cruise, and volcanic ash ingested by jet engines is smelted into glass deposits that quickly choke them. Over London, no planes fly. The city's constant rumble is much diminished. The sky, blue and cloudless, is the province only of birds.

We live, some believe, in the anthropocene age, an era in which human beings have massively altered global ecosystems, and which may have begun with the invention of agriculture, but certainly accelerated during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and the oil-based economy of the twentieth and early twenty-first. But Earth's climate and geography, and human history, has also been shaped by more powerful processes. Volcanic activity has been implicated in the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which wiped out more than 90% of marine species, and 70% of vetebrate animal species on land. The Toba supereruption between 69000 and 77000 years ago created a decade of global winter that could have caused the reduction in human numbers and the bottleneck in human evolution that marks our genomes to this day. Ashes and sulphur compounds injected into the stratosphere by volcanic activity is believed to have contributed to global cooling during the Little Ice Age between the 16th and mid 19th century, and the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused the Year Without Summer, ruining crops around the world and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths (and creating spectacular sunsets documented in paintings by Turner).

Eyjafjallajökull may have created all kinds of disruption to travellers, but compared to supervulcanism of the past, or to what might happen if the volcanic dome under Yellowstone Park lets go, it's a mere blip. An inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. A useful reminder that the nemesis which may clobber us won't necessarily be the product of our own hubris. Meanwhile, I'm off to enjoy a spot of peace and quiet while I can.

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Eastercon 2010, the verbals

‘I could have emailed you,’ David Langford said, coming over to say hello after we’d spent some time working online at different tables in a bar. But even the science-fiction community hasn’t yet reached the point of total online immersion, which is why some 1200 people had gathered for the UK national sf convention, Eastercon. Last year, it was in the post-industrial fairyland of Bradford; this year it was back in Heathrow, in a massive hotel that looked like a cut-price brutalist version of the Baths of Caracalla, set on a dual carriageway that was cheek-by-jowl with a howling runway and lined with the kind of office buildings that get blown up in the Die Hard franchise. An exurbia for people in transit. A transport corridor where CCTV cameras outnumbered pedestrians. But while the setting may have been a hardcore Ballardian dystopia, it meant that, for a convention reasonably close to London, costs were kept down to an affordable level, and besides, few of us were there for the architecture or local ambience.

Eastercons have to cater for the multitudinous interests of a wide variety of fans -- and if enough of them are interested in (say) campanology, then a talk or workshop in campanology becomes, by syllogy, sf. Writers (like me) might grumble about the lack of programming about actual books, but they’re always reminded, when they arrive at the convention, that it’s run by fans for fans. And some of them, shock horror, don’t even care all that much about written sf (fortunately, an awful lot of them do). Suck it up, get with the programme.

This year, there was a definite etsy/steampunk vibe, but there was also a very strong and well-attended science stream, with panels and some excellent talks, quite a few by people outside the sf world -- always a good sign. I wasn’t there for the whole convention, so managed to go to only one item I wasn’t involved in, a barnstormer of a talk by The Economist's Oliver Morton on geoengineering. It followed hard on the heels of a talk by Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column for the Guardian. I would have liked to have gone to both, but had just done a 9.00 am panel and was still suffering from caffeine deficiency. So it goes.

What else? The book room was admirably full of stalls selling books, and there was a considerable small press presence, with signings and launches. I scored a reasonable copy of the original Penguin edition of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (‘D’you think it could be my cactus that’s upsetting him’), a cheap paperback edition of Gertrude Friedberg’s The Revolving Boy (her first and only sf novel), and a copy of John Clute’s latest collection of criticism, Canary Fever. And there were, of course, plenty of random encounters and late-night conversations, which is, in the end, kind of the point of going. That, and Heathrow’s famous chicken-rat garden. I’d tell you about that, but really, you had to be there.

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Heathrow, Eastercon, 2010

Convention hotel.


'I'll show you the life of the mind.'


Keep going.


Full coverage.


Better truth through advertising.


Instructions to cab drivers.


Do not feed the birds.

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