Gnarl

A picture of men at work. Two astronauts (Michael Good on the left, Garret Reisman on the right) peek through the windows of the aft flight deck of the space shuttle Atlantis, before heading off to install batteries and other equipment to the exterior of the International Space Station. Your average everyday experience, in low Earth orbit (can you name, off the top of your head, every astronaut who has spacewalked? Can you even hazard a guess at the number?* We shouldn't be complacent about the amazingly difficult, dangerous and technically awesome feat of building and maintaining and space station. It's still not exactly a routine human experience, but we have been a space-going species for a couple of generations, now).

What I'm especially interested in are the controls in the foreground (check out the full-resolution photo here). Not just the clunky electromechanical switches and joystick, set in battleship-grey utilitarian panels, although it does remind us that Atlantis is 34 years old, built when prog rock and flares were still in fashion, and personal computers, mobile phones, iPads and cyberspace weren't even science fictional concepts; and here we are in the future, with spaceships designed forty-odd years ago just reaching retirement, and how science-fictional is that? No, what's especially interesting is the human clutter, the solutions to work-a-day problems. The patches of blue velcro stuck at intervals on every surface. The propelling pencil on the right, with its velcro collar. The two lab timers, with cryptic felt-pen identifying codes. The Post-it notes. The human clutter - the gnarl, the telling details that bring a scene alive. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to dinner with Al Reynolds and French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré, who flew two missions on the Mir space station. One detail especially sticks in my mind. The Russians sent up fresh food to their space station in automated Progress resupply vehicles; when the airlock was opened after the Progress vehicle had docked, the unbearably evocative smell of apples, of the planet Earth, filled the air.

[edit] *a list of spacewalking astronauts

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Composition

So right now I'm going backwards to go forwards with the second draft of the ongoing. Usually I like to press onward, ever onward, but I had a sudden blink of inspiration about the true nature of the kind of work one of the characters was doing before he became caught up in the plot, and rather than leave it until revision I unravelled an early chapter, dropped in a chunk of prose, and restitched it.

This is what happens when you don't spend a couple of months planning out a novel in every detail before writing it straight out. Which I understand is technically possible, but isn't for me. Much of the writing process in the first and second drafts is a process of discovery - or rather, a process of blundering about in a dark room, bumping into things while looking for a way out.

I do make lots of notes, actually, but usually ignore most of them because for me making notes is a Darwinian process of evolving and discarding possibilities. What's left for this project are lists of names, all kinds of notes and references on the evolution and structure of gas giants, brief portraits of various cities and odd little worldlets, and some chunks of the back stories of various characters that may or may not be threaded through the narrative. I also accumulate, like most writers who use word processors, a collection of sentences and paragraphs and entire scenes that drop below the fold.

She was still looking all around, drinking in fresh details in the view, when a second pod everted and the blunt triangle of the drone detached with a thump and flare of thrust that sent it flying away from the train.

At the same time, the child was attempting to make contact with the tutelary spirits of the river and forest. Her fantasy about the involvement of the river folk in the boy’s death had taken root and flourished.

Cactus skeleton. Fog spreads. Wonder at someone who can control weather.

And then he ducked away under the slanting barrel of the telescope and he was gone, and I could move again. The young woman beckoned to me, and I followed without thought or question through a doorway I had not noticed before, and found myself stumbling from the translation frame in the softly-lit room in the administration centre. The interview was over.

Sometimes it seems to me that what's left out is as important as what's left in.

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Angels Over America

Hey, the new Pyr catalogue is out, so now I can tell you that Cowboy Angels will be published in the US of A in January 2011. The fabulous cover - my third by him - with a train exiting a Turing gate, is by Sparth. The retro lettering is great, too, and entirely appropriate: the novel is set in the 1980s, in a variety of Americas.

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