Friday 30 December 2011
Thursday 29 December 2011
That Was The Year That Was
Posted on 12:13 by Unknown
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.
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.
Saturday 24 December 2011
God's Own Christmas Ornament
Posted on 03:01 by Unknown
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.
Thursday 22 December 2011
Night Movies
Posted on 12:57 by Unknown
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 Christmas 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 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 Christmas 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.
Wednesday 21 December 2011
The Dead Hand Of The Past
Posted on 07:17 by Unknown
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?
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?
Saturday 17 December 2011
A Haunting We Will Go
Posted on 10:22 by Unknown
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.
Friday 16 December 2011
Don't Call Me Sherly
Posted on 02:21 by Unknown
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.
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.
Monday 12 December 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 9
Posted on 07:33 by Unknown
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
Sunday 11 December 2011
Through The Past, Darkly
Posted on 10:26 by Unknown
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.
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.
Friday 9 December 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale - Chapter 8
Posted on 06:31 by Unknown
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...
Wednesday 7 December 2011
More Ebookery - Special Promotional Prices
Posted on 01:07 by Unknown
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.
Tuesday 6 December 2011
Introduction To Stories From The Quiet War
Posted on 01:39 by Unknown
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 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.
Monday 5 December 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 7
Posted on 07:10 by Unknown
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
Sunday 4 December 2011
Ebookery
Posted on 06:01 by Unknown
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.
Friday 2 December 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 6
Posted on 08:40 by Unknown
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
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Startling Stories of Super Science
Posted on 07:34 by Unknown
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.
Monday 28 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 5
Posted on 08:46 by Unknown
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.
Friday 25 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 4
Posted on 06:54 by Unknown
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.
Thursday 24 November 2011
Hugo
Posted on 12:32 by Unknown
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?
Wednesday 23 November 2011
Lynn Margulis
Posted on 06:19 by Unknown
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.
Monday 21 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 3
Posted on 08:41 by Unknown
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.
Sunday 20 November 2011
An Analogy
Posted on 09:25 by Unknown
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.
Friday 18 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 2
Posted on 04:14 by Unknown
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
Wednesday 16 November 2011
Endorsing The Future
Posted on 09:23 by Unknown
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?
Monday 14 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 1
Posted on 01:30 by Unknown
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.
Read more here.
Saturday 12 November 2011
Also Applies To Genre
Posted on 04:11 by Unknown
"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.)
Wednesday 9 November 2011
'Bruce Springsteen'
Posted on 08:58 by Unknown
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.
Tuesday 8 November 2011
Eating Rites
Posted on 11:34 by Unknown
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.)
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.)
Tuesday 1 November 2011
Aliens Among Us
Posted on 09:54 by Unknown
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.
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.
Sunday 30 October 2011
Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (13)
Posted on 08:17 by Unknown
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.
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.
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Reality Check
Posted on 10:52 by Unknown
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.
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.
Thursday 20 October 2011
Alternate History
Posted on 09:51 by Unknown
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.
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.
Tuesday 18 October 2011
Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (12)
Posted on 10:04 by Unknown
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
Sunday 16 October 2011
Humanity
Posted on 10:33 by Unknown
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
Monday 10 October 2011
Monday 3 October 2011
Now You See It
Posted on 12:17 by Unknown
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:
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.
Saturday 1 October 2011
Monday 19 September 2011
A Transect
Posted on 03:34 by Unknown
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.
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