Notes From The Anthropocene

As global warming melts the Siberian permafrost, mammoth ivory becomes increasingly fashionable:

With an estimated 150m corpses under the permafrost, stocks are unlikely to run out soon, and thanks to global warming (every cloud . . .) they are becoming increasingly easy to reach. Meanwhile, a report in the Pachyderm journal offers the ringing endorsement that mammoth ivory could "reduce demand for elephant ivory from Africa. Probably."

The old-school energy industry wants to capitalise on the opening of the Northwest Passage by building nuclear-powered icebreakers that could transport cargoes of liquified natural gas through Arctic ice. What could possibly go wrong?

Autopia experiences its hottest day on record.

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Muscle To The Monorail

At first glance, this Google-sponsored project to develop a muscle-powered monorail system, based on a New Zealand amusement-park ride, looks like a silly parody of the worst kind of kooky Kalifornian keep-fit utopianism. As an article in Wired points out, it doesn't seem to do anything that bicycles can't do better, and besides, ugh, public transport.

It's certainly not anything like the kind of futuristic transport systems we were promised back in the 1960s, when the last hurrah of Gernsbackian ideology promised all kinds of amazing machines powered by electricity too cheap to be worth metering. But the future isn't what it used to be - it's gnarlier, more diverse, extremely uneven. In the age of post-peak oil, this kind of low-impact technology is beginning to seem more plausible than, say, nuclear-powered supersonic stratosphere cruisers. And even if it doesn't find any application in the regreened cities of Earth, I reckon it would be ideal for tootling around the forest canopy of a domed moon colony - far better than the usual golf carts, although it would be a challenge to stage a pod-based chase scene.

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Book Marks

We didn't have many books in the house where I grew up, and because I couldn't afford to buy enough paperbacks to feed my science-fiction habit, most of my reading material came from the local library. It was modern, well-lighted, and amply stocked; when I had exhausted its science-fiction collection, I moved on to what we inside the genre call mainstream novels (starting, as I recall, with John Updike's Rabbit Redux, which hooked me because of the odd and arresting title, and the fact that it began on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing). And it was amongst the mainstream novels that I first encountered tracks of the library-book annotators: readers who couldn't keep their thoughts to themselves, victims of a kind of literary Tourette's syndrome that compelled them to underscore words, sentences, and whole paragraphs, and sprinkle the margins with pointless exclamation marks and remarks.

It always annoyed me; always struck me as a pernicious form of vandalism. I valued books because they were an important part of my life and I possessed so few of my own. And besides, why should I care what strangers thought about the books I'd chosen to read? Their jotted egoblurts annoyingly snagged my attention, and were never interesting, polarised between so true! and utter rubbish! Accumulating my own library, it never occurred to me to jot my own thoughts in the books I owned. Even when I had a regular gig reviewing for Interzone magazine, I wrote notes on sheets of scrap paper as I went along, keyed to page and line, rather than scribble in the margins of review copies. So reading this excellent article about author's libraries and the value of annotation, has given me pause for thought. Can it be true that all this time I've been denying posterity the opportunity to peer into my thoughts? Why, I haven't even signed any of the copies of my own books that I keep on my ego shelves . . .

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Dude, Where's My Human-Powered Ornithopter?

Right here. Leonardo would be thrilled. Pasquale would be appalled.

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Teleportation

My latest time-sink on the internet is Joe McMichael's Globe Genie. It's a clever and simple idea: click on the shuffle button, and it transports you to one of the millions of locations stored in Google Earth. While jumping around the USA, wondering if I'll come across a road I've driven down, it occurred to me that its randomness is a story generator. Where are those people going? Who lives in that house? What's he building, in there? You're on an empty road in Gilt Edge, Tennessee. Why? And happens next? What links Jumonville Road, Hopwood, PA and Los Robles Boulevard, Sacramento, CA? Also, why do so many people own RVs?

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The Return Of The Living Dead

Just received in the post, my author's copy of John Joseph Adams's anthology The Living Dead 2. Includes my invasion-of-the-Boltzmann-Brain-zombies story 'The Thought War' and forty-three (yes, forty-three) other tales of the undead dead. Check it out!

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Plumbing

Now I'm working on the third draft of the ongoing, I have to keep in mind the cardinal rule of world-building: details are useful only if they have some kind of interaction or intersection with the protagonist, which is to say, something to do with the narrative. In science fiction novels, as in fantasy and historical fiction, nothing should be taken for granted, of course. Otherwise the novel will suffer from the flattening effect of genre: of sharing too much stock furniture with other, similar fictions. So there’s a temptation to tip in explanations for everything, to show that you’ve built your world from the ground up. But good world building always implies more than’s on the page. You want to make your protagonist's world as vivid as possible, to highlight all that's strange and unique; but you don't want to bury the story in endless detail and explanation. So unless it's something the protagonist notices, something he has to deal with, something he wants or needs or something that can help him get what he needs, and so on, it's extraneous. It's plumbing. You know it’s there, but unless it goes wrong you don’t need to worry about it.

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Maps For New Territory

As far as I'm concerned there are two ways of writing a short story. First, there's the epiphanic, where more or less the whole package arrives in your head and is unpacked by writing it down. It doesn't happen often, but I'm always thrilled when it does. 'Little Lost Robot' and 'The Thought War' happened like that. The second is much more like work. I start with an idea, usually a character and a situation, an opening scene, and proceed from there. It's like exploring new territory without a map. You stumble into cul-de-sacs and pitfalls, and waste time picking up nuggets that turn out to be iron pyrites instead of the motherlode, but you travel on in the hope of finding a fabulous view or something rare and unexpected around the next corner. And sometimes scenes or ideas you discard become the seeds for a second story. What started out as exploration becomes cartography.

That's how the Quiet War series of stories evolved, and eventually turned into two novels (with a third on the way, but it's bad luck to talk about that right now). If I were brighter and more organised, novels and stories would have dovetailed neatly together. As it was, the stories turned out to be trial runs for the novels. Maybe I'll do better next time, with what some have started calling the Jackaroo stories, in which an alien species makes contact with the people of Earth after a short sharp global conflict, and hand them the keys to a bunch of planetary systems orbiting red dwarf stars and linked by wormholes. What does humanity do with this gift? What does the gift do to humanity? And what's the catch?

So far, there are just six stories.* But I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to get down and deal with the big picture.

*‘Dust’, Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, Daw, 2006
 ‘Making Peace’, The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, HarperCollins, 2007
 ‘Adventure’, Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008
'City of the Dead' Postscripts, 2008
 ‘Crimes and Glory’, Subterranean Magazine, 2009
‘The Choice’, Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011

EDIT: Of the above stories, only 'Crimes and Glory' is available online, here. Of the Quiet War stories, 'Reef' was available via my author's page at the Orion site, but was lost after a redesign; you might be able to find it using the wayback machine or similar. I'm thinking of putting up one on my web site's fiction archive. Any preferences?
EDIT 2: I totally forgot to include 'City of the Dead'. Corrected now. I'd like to think it's because I'm hip-deep in a third draft, but really it's down to stupidity. Thanks to Miles for pointing out the error!

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Quiet War Stories

Ram Gowda emailed to ask if I had a list of stories related to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. I thought I'd put it up here rather than on the increasingly out-of-date website, which badly needs a major overhaul. I set it up in the mid-1990s, using a basic HTML scripting programme, and it is really showing its age; must get around to making it look twenty-first century when I'm less distracted. Or pay someone to do it for me. Meanwhile, here are the stories, with the usual caveat that they were published piecemeal over a decade, and represent the first iteration of the Quiet War universe. Portions of several of them have been folded into Gardens of the Sun, in highly modified forms.

'Second Skin' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1997
'Sea Change, With Monsters' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1998
'The Gardens of Saturn' Interzone, 1998
'Reef' Sky Life, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace, 2000
'Making History' PS Publishing, 2000
'The Passenger' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
'The Assassination of Faustino Malarte' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
‘Dead Men Walking’ Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2006
‘Incomers’ The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008

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