Davos In Space

I want to tell you about a few things that inspired the back history of The Quiet War. Let’s start with the World Economic Forum. An annual gathering in the small alpine town of Davos where, inside a ring of steely Swiss security, the mega-rich mingle with world leaders and high-grade chugging teams from humanitarian aid charities:

There's a definite pecking order to the annual jamboree of global leaders. The creme de la creme of the world elite get a chopper in from Zurich airport. Mere chief executives of multinational companies arrive by limo. Meanwhile, charity leaders, religious figures, journalists and hoi polloi trundle up the mountain around icy hairpin bends in complementary shuttle buses.

The 2011 meeting has just ended. But what would happen if the guests never left?

That’s kind of like the scenario in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The novel’s elusive driving force, John Galt, disgusted by the way in the world has turned to socialism, sets up a refuge in the Colorado Rockies where innovators and go-getters hole up and go on strike while all around them, for want of their talent and energy, everything goes to hell in a hand-basket. An unlikely scenario, it seems to me: a fantasy underpinned by the kind of enormous but fragile egotism that prompts little boys to take their ball away when it looks like they’re about to lose the game. More likely to fall apart in all kinds of interestingly savage ways than to hold the line. I much prefer El Rey, the dark mirror-image of Galt’s Gulch in Jim Thompson’s The Getaway: a luxurious Mexican hideout where criminals can enjoy the fruits of their big scores until the money runs out - and that’s where their problems begin, because once you’ve checked in to El Rey, you can never check out . . .

It’s no surprise that something like the World Economic Forum Meeting should be held in Switzerland. Aside from scenery, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, looking after other people’s money is what Switzerland is all about. Protected by the Alps, the Swiss armed forces and secret police (every other person in Geneva looks like a secret police), and centuries of imperturbable omerta, it’s one of the oldest tax havens.  Great Britain isn’t far behind. British citizens able to claim that they are non-domiciled residents can stay at home and pay only a notional amount of tax. Others can shelter their cash in the offshore tax havens of the Channel Islands (more secret-police omerta) and the Isle of Man (Viking omerta). And doors along the streets of the capitals of British overseas territories and former protectorates and colonies in kinder latitudes glitter with brass plates for local firms that are fronts for international banks, businesses and individuals who benefit from low, low local tax rates.

If the rich can’t keep their money close to where they have to live, they like to visit it as often as possible. And because most tax havens are islands, or border the Mediterranean or Caribbean or the Indian Ocean, many of the mega-rich own a yacht. Preferably a really big yacht. Not only because it screams out your status as it jostles amongst its fellows at Cannes, say, or Bermuda’s Hamilton Harbour, but because it can act as a temporary refuge should things go badly pear-shaped: in theory, your creditors can’t touch you on the high seas.

But suppose things go pear-shaped all over the world? Even the biggest floating tax refuge, The World, needs to touch land and resupply. If climate change, economic collapse, popular revolutions and war collide in a perfect storm, the mega-rich will need their own Galt’s Gulch/El Rey.

We’re back to The Quiet War, where the mega-rich flee first find refuge from that perfect storm in New Zealand, a stable Western democracy that’s nicely remote and pretty well placed to ride out the worst effects of rapid climate change.  Then things get worse and the mega-rich up and leave Earth for the Moon, and take over and expand a Japanese colony. (Do you really think Richard Branson is interested in space tourism? It’s really cover for development and manufacture of space yachts for the far-sighted rich.)

But even the Moon isn’t far enough. As the Earth recovers, its new power blocs chase after the mega-rich, who split into two. The more aggressive group heads to Mars, tries to drop an asteroid on Earth, and are blasted to oblivion. The rest, including most of the scientists, engineers and technicians who kept the Moon colony running, flee to the moons of Jupiter, and then spread to the moons of Saturn, where they develop a scientific utopia quarantined by distance. But eventually even that isn’t far enough . . . The taxman has a longer reach than even John Galt could imagine.

UPDATE: Those yachts keep getting bigger. Also, Galt is the elusive mastermind of Atlas Shrugged, not The Fountainhead: corrected (thanks, N.E.).

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Reboot

When people ask me how to write a book, I usually tell them to start at the begining and keep writing until you reach the end. It sounds a little snarky, I know, but it's genuine advice born out of hard experience.  It's easy to start a book; hard to reach the end.  Either because you find something else to do that seems a lot more fun and life-enhancing than sitting at a notebook or a computer day after day, or because you've started in the wrong place and can't get past the opening scenes.  The latter happens to me a lot.  Not every time, but fairly frequently, so that by now I no longer panic when I realise that the 10,000 words I've set down aren't going anywhere because I can't get to where I want to go from the place where I began.

That's what's just happened with the new book, and it's okay.  It's part of the process.  As usual, I've been finding my way into my character's world, and most of what I've set down is backstory and scene-setting that doesn't really advance the plot.  I may use some of it elsewhere; the rest is useful mulch.  Stuff I need to know to tell the story, even if it isn't in the narrative.  It happened with The Quiet War - I was 30,000 words in that time.  Too much background; too much hesitation before plunging in.  It didn't happen with Gardens of the Sun because it picked up The Quiet War's story, and I knew enough about the fictional framework to work out exactly where I needed to start up again.  All good.  But then I had the same problem with one story strand of In The Mouth Of The Whale, and I didn't get that fixed until I realised that the character was a librarian, not a cop.  A small change that made all the difference.

I was diverted from the new novel, in fact, because I had to deal with some useful comments my agent made about In The Mouth Of The Whale.  Fixed those, sent the MSS back to my agent, who's about to send it off to my editor.  Went back to the new book, saw it wasn't right, and inside a day had rebooted with a new beginning.  Starting where the narrative really starts, as far as the character is concerned.  And now that he's in a lot more trouble than he was before, I feel a lot better.

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Inspiration

The cottage in which I grew up was the third in a row of four, with a large shared back garden that ran down to the ruins of a canal lock. A little way beyond was a station on a single-track branch railway line affectionately known as the Dudbridge Donkey.  Before the Beeching Act killed it off, small steam and diesel locomotives hauled goods trains back and forth; my route to primary school crossed the line and on my way back home I'd often see a locomotive rootling about with a few wagons in the truncated goods yard.  I've retained an abiding affection for railways ever since.

Before Lord of the Rings, there was the Chronicles of Narnia, written by Tolkein's fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis.  I read them over again when I was a child.  My favourite was the origin story, The Magician's Nephew.  It featured a wood between worlds where you could, by stepping into one or another of its many shallow pools, access alternate universes.

In the late 1960s, I loved to watch The Time Tunnel, a briefly-lived series created by Irwin Allen in which, as the opening narration of each episode put it:

"Two American scientists are lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America's greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time."

Murray Leinster, widely credited with the invention of parallel universe stories, wrote the tie-in novel.

Where do science-fiction writers get their crazy ideas?

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My Grandmother's Bestiary

A few pages from one of the first books I ever owned, a Victorian volume on natural history given to me by my grandmother when I was a small youngling.  According to its unknown author:

The following pages were commenced solely in the hope of affording such a simple, and, at the same time, such a systematical introduction to the Linnean System of Zoology, as might induce young persons to an earnest pursuit of the study of Natural History . . .  it has, throughout, been his constant endeavour to divert the attention from secondary causes, and to turn it to the Almighty and only Source of Being, Power, and Truth.

As far as I was concerned, the first part worked; the second, not so much. The illustrations strive towards accuracy, but are infused with a certain degree of anthropomorphism.  I especially like the snakes, revelling in their sneaky, snakey nature.

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Kindled, ibooked

While I'm still contemplating bringing out old and new short-story collections as ebooks, Gollancz, my British publishers, have published five of my backlist novels in electronic format.  They include: Four Hundred Billion Stars and Eternal Light, early examples of new space opera that chronicle the adventures of Dorthy Yoshida as she travels to the centre of the galaxy and back again; Red Dust, my Martian ninjapunk novel; Pasquale's Angel, my alternative history Renaissancepunk novel; and Fairyland, my first biopunk novel.  Each for the very reasonable price of £4.49, or $7.33, on Kindle.  They're also available, I'm told, as ibooks, but I'm one of the few authors who haven't converted to Apple, so I haven't been able to check.


Four Hundred Billion Stars, by the way, is my first novel, published by Del Rey as a paperback way back in 1988.  I wrote it on a manual typewriter, and because photocopying was expensive in those days, I typed the final version on a sandwich of bond, carbon, and bank paper (I still have the carbon copy, somewhere).  Now it's out there in the cloud.  Science fiction!

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In Public

So next month I'll be appearing at not one but two universities in London.  The first gig* is at the London School of Economics, where on February 17 I'll be sharing a platform with Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod and talking about science fiction and international orders as part of a one-day literary festival.  It's free, but you'll need to get a ticket - details on the web page.

And two days later, on the 19th, I'll be appearing at Imperial College's Picocon 28, with fellow Guests of Honour Juliet McKenna and Kari Sperring.  I'm giving a talk and reading, starting at 11.30, I believe.

EDIT: *apologies for the inappropriate use of 'gig'; I came over all rock and/or roll for a moment

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When You Wish Upon A Star, Be Careful To Choose the Right Star

Apropos the mention of star-watching in the last post, XKCD's latest (click to embiggen):

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Getting Into Death

Here were Joshie's beginnings. A dystopian upper-class childhood in several elite American suburbs. Total immersion in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The twelve-year-old's first cognition of mortality, for the true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will end. The totality of it. The self-love. Not wanting to die. Wanting to live, but not sure why. Looking up at the nighttime sky, at the black eternity of outer space, amazed.
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Which set me to thinking about my own long-ago self, when he was at that golden age. Was he really getting into death, back then, when he got hooked into the mainline of SF?  I don't think that he thought that he did.  He was a bright, disorganised kid living in a small town, and like many such he wanted to get out.  SF opened up new worlds to him. America. The future. Easy travel to other planets.  And some of his favourite stories - Theodore Sturgeon's 'The Way Home', Tiptree's 'Beam Me Home' - were about about ways of escape.  When he looked up at the stars in the summer nights sky, he wasn't thinking about eternity. He was wondering if someone like him was up there on a warm wet blue planet circling a yellow star, looking up at their night sky and thinking what  he was thinking.  He was projecting.  He wanted out bad, and SF was balm to that ache.

Well I got out, and I became a scientist, which is what I wanted to be, and then I became an SF writer, which I also wanted to be, and how cool is that?  And now I think, about the SF I read and the SF I write: yeah, in one way or another, it's all about death. I'm just starting in on the editing process of a novel about avoiding the inevitable and the costs this could incur, which is one reason the quote caught my interest.  It's something I've been thinking about.  Also, when I tweeted part of the quote at the head of this, my friend Andrew McKie tweeted back 'I have long maintained the death thing. There's audio somewhere of me droning on to Kincaid about it at a BSFA thing.'  Hard to argue about this with Mr McKie: he once worked for the best bit of the Telegraph - the obits department.  To borrow a line from Michael Connelly, death is his beat.

I used to think SF was all about change, but all change means leaving something behind. I left behind my childhood when I quit that little town for university, and never really came all the way back.  Death is a more permanent kind of change. And if you avoid it somehow, that will change you too.  You won't be some eternal extropian twentysomething, planning to turn a galaxy into beer and pizza.  You'll be something so deeply weird the future equivalent of all the world's armies would try to take you down if you ever returned to Earth.

But we're not just talking about childhood's end, or the all-too-brief span of human life, in SF. We're talking about the end of everything. The end of the universe, maybe flattening out forever, maybe crunching back down into the Singularity of a new universe, maybe giving birth to hundreds of new universes. We're talking about the end of reality.  We're talking about hard, important questions. If everything is in flux, what is useful and what isn't? What do we do with our knowledge about the immensity of the universe and the seemingly microscopic size of our place within it? How can we make sense of that, and learn to live with it? Is it really possible to develop strategies to avoid the heatdeath of the Universe or surfing the wave of a new Big Bang? And what then? And what then...

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E-Bookery

Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to comment here or on Twitter.  All very useful, especially as there was reasonably general agreement about the price range.  It seems to me that if I go ahead with this crazy idea I should price the OOP collections at around £4.20 (which includes the VAT eBooks attract), or possibly a little lower.  That would come in at a little under $7 at the current exchange rate, which might be a bit high for US readers, but perhaps not too high (Would they have to pay VAT?  I realise that I have no idea.  If not, the price would be well under $6.)  That's somewhat less than the price my UK publishers are charging for a couple of OOP novels that have sneaked out as eBooks.  I wouldn't charge much more for the new collection, to be honest.  All of three would consist of reprinted stories after all.

A couple of other points, if you can bear it (authors do tend to go on and on about eBooks, so forgive me).  The price of printing a book is only a small part of the cover price.  Editing, production design, maintaining offices and warehousing and distribution add a bit more.  A large chunk goes to the end seller; much smaller chunks go to the publisher and author.  So the idea that eBooks are much cheaper to produce because they aren't physical objects isn't exactly right; although they are somewhat cheaper, new books still have to be edited, given cover art and so on.  As for the price difference between hardback and paperbacks, at the moment, some people are still willing to pay extra for the latest book by their favourite authors, just as they're willing to pay extra to see a film in a first-run cinema.  That will change, I think.  (it would also be nice if hardbacks in the UK were all printed on acid-free paper, to give them the kind of permanence of US editions.)  At any rate, OOP titles revived as eBooks should definitely be cheaper.  Some are very cheap indeed - presumably in the hope that what's lost per unit will be made up in greater volumes of sales.  Not sure I want to go there quite yet.

One commentator raised the point that people below a certain age expect books to be free. As I'm well above that certain age, and still earn my living from writing and selling fiction: I don't.  And I still buy books at full price, when I have to.  But if it's free fiction you want, then look here.  There's a small anthology's worth of free stuff.  And you're welcome to distribute under the terms of the Creative Commons License.  Think of it as a gift, or as a taster for stuff you can buy.  Whatever.

PS Chris asks why the Confluence trilogy isn't back in print.  Good question!  I'm trying to persuade my UK publishers to do just that.  Hopefully in one nice fat volume.  And failing that option, I do have the eBook rights...

UPDATE: Again, thanks for commenting; thought I'd reply here rather than under the fold.  Various people have given me cogent reasons not to simply stick with Amazon/Kindle.  My plan now, such as it is and if I go forward with my idea to self-publish those OOP collections, would be to use Kindle as an experiment, and then go to the more open format ePub format, which appeals to me because it is supported on all kinds of platforms (including Stanza, which I use), and I think gets around the licensing problem . . . but it looks like it'll be a steep learning curve.  RFYork - thanks for the link to Charlie Stross's blog post on why books aren't cheap and to talkie_tim and Blue Tyson for supporting arguments : exactly.  And here are a couple of good posts on why pirating books hurt the author rather than sticks it to the 'greedy publisher'.  I especially like Saundra Mitchell's suggestions for ways that the problem can be turned around to help the reader and the author.   More news, when I have it.  Don't hold your breath, though; I have one book to edit, and another to write, and I'm seriously short on the kind of Victorian can-do energy that enabled Charles Dickens to be a novelist, a magazine publisher, and a smash-hit performer (and killed him, in the end...).

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A Question

So I'm giving some serious thought to republishing, as ebooks, two out-of-print short-story collections,  The Invisible Country and Little Machines.  Also, to compiling and publishing in ebook form a substantial new collection featuring the 'Quiet War' stories and some other space-opera stories.  How much would people be prepared to pay for ebook versions of a previously-published but OOP short story collection?  And how much for a new collection?  ('Nothing' isn't an answer, by the way.  I have meet the costs of publishing (new covers, formatting and so on); also, I have to eat.)

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Cowboy Angels And The Old Weird

Cowboy Angels, now available in the US, describes a journey across a variety of alternate Americas; it's structured like a road movie, and like all good road movies it has a soundtrack.  Music features over and again in the narrative - the opening scene has Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming playing in the background, there’s more Dylan sprinkled here and there, a fond memory of some old dance tunes, and an anachronistic guest appearance by Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings. The music is more than decoration, more than texture.  It stands for something lost. Something that the hero, Adam Stone, is looking for, even though he doesn’t realise quite what he’s found, and how he can redeem it, until the closing pages.

A major influence on Cowboy Angels was Greil Marcus’s book Invisible Republic. It’s an extraordinary meditation on the Matter of America and its lost and shadow selves that widens out from an examination of the music that Dylan and the Band made together in the basement of the Band’s rented house in Woodstock, NY, where Dylan had retreated after his bruising World Tour with the Band in 1966 (the electrified passages of his concert were greeted with howls of derision and anger by folk fans; one famously called out ‘Judas’, to which a rattled Dylan replied, ‘I don't believe you . . . you're a liar,’ before turning to the Band as they gathered up the opening of "Like A Rolling Stone" and telling them to ‘play it fucking loud!’). The Basement Tapes may be the way into the central argument of Invisible Republic, but at the heart of the book is a collection of obscure folk music compiled and curated by Harry Smith and issued in 1952 as the Anthology of American Folk Music, described by Marcus as ‘an elaborate, dubiously legal bootleg, a compendium of recordings originally released on and generally forgotten by such still-active labels . . . [that was] the founding document of the American folk revival.’ Divided into three sections - ‘Ballads’, ‘Social Music’, and ‘Songs’ - it chronicles tales of archetypal murder, revenge and disaster, music of public celebration and appeals to God, and songs of ‘wishes and fears, difficulties and satisfactions that are, you know, as plain as day, but also, in the voices of those who are now singing, the work of demons - demons like your neighbours, your family, your lovers, yourself.’

Inspired by the cadence of a phrase ‘the old free America’ used by the poet Kenneth Rexroth ‘to describe the country he thought lay behind Carl Sandburg’s work’, Marcus named the territory that opens up out of Smith’s Anthology as the ‘old, weird America’. It is the territory where there still lives all that is strange and distinctive of the lost, gone world inhabited by the singers of the songs collected by Smith, and its capital is Smithville: ‘a mystical body of the republic, a kind of public secret: a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act, a declaration of a weird but clearly recognisable America within the America of the exercise of institutional majoritarian power.’

This is the America that Adam Stone is searching for as he travels through alternate Americas and discovers a weird, secret world of conspiracies working within conspiracies, a world where the dead live again, a woman can be murdered over and again, the past is as mutable as the future and one is hand in hand with the other, and where a lost love can be rescued from death, if you are willing to pay the price.

The old singers, the traditional people whose end Dylan saw in the early 1960s, after they had been rediscovered by fans and brought out to play at the Newport Jazz Festival and other venues, were all gone by the time I first visited America in the early 1980s. But I was able to glimpse traces of their world while I was living in Los Angeles, and during visits in the years immediately after my stint as a legal alien. A world before the spread of strip malls, exurbias; before Clearwater and Fox News; before the corporate homogenisation of what seemed like an unquenchable abundance of deep history, of regional tradition and variety.

I remember on one visit driving in my hire car around the Beltway of Washington DC an hour after deplaning when Simon and Garfunkel’s 'America' came on the radio, and I was so lost in the gap between the yearning of the song, its personal resonances, and the actuality of driving in America that I missed my exit and had to park in a street sunk deep in twilight and the deep quiet dream of suburbia to gather my wits. (The secret name of Cowboy Angels, the original title vetoed by its publishers but surviving as the title of its central section, is Look For America.) I remember driving across the state line into North Carolina where fireworks were everywhere advertised for sale and the radio was suddenly full of bluegrass and hellfire preaching. I remember driving past the wreckage of an Antebellum house, of finding Raleigh-Durham airport full of Civil War reentactors (I have a memory that they carried their rifles onto the plane - it may be false, but those were certainly more innocent times).

Those were the days of Ronald Reagan, who if he did nothing else brought back to America the idea of hopefulness, who in his 1984 acceptance of the Republican Party nomination invoked the image of America as a city on a hill:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

It's an image that, as Greil Marcus notes, may have been intended as a sign of American triumphalism, but three hundred years before was a warning, a prophecy of self-betrayal invoked by John Winthrop in 1630 to describe to his fellow Puritans what awaited them in the New World, and what would happen if they failed to meet its promise:

For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon vs: soe that if wee shall deale faslely with our god in thos worke wee haue vndertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from vs, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake euill of the ways of god and all professours for Gods sake; we shall shame the face of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses vopn vs tll wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing.

That doubled image of alternate Americas - the shining city as testament to glory or as a curse on failure - is at the heart of Cowboy Angels' story; the story of the kind of America Adam Stone’s America has become, and what he does about it.

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Stonecutters

'Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, We do.'

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My Grandmother's Photograph Album

One of the memes endlessly circulating the Sargasso of the internet is that the living now outnumber the dead.  It seems to be based on the exponential mathematics of the population explosion: if two people have three children, and if those children each have three children, and so on, and so on, then in only a few generations it's a mathematical inevitability that there will be more living descendants than dead ancestors.

But like too many simple ideas it has a fatal flaw: we tend to underestimate the numbers of the dead. One calculation, quoted in a debunking article published in the Scientific American, suggests that around 106 billion people have been born; since only 6 billion are currently alive, 94% of all people ever born are dead.  Or as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick suggested in their foreword to the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.'

An inspection of old photograph albums confirms this simple truth.  Here are the dead, in their multitudes.  They are dressed in antique costumes, stand in front of new cars, hold up babies.  They are often on holiday.

 

We know so little about them.  Many are nameless, now.  Yet they wait patiently for us.  They have plenty of time, after all.  The universe is still young: a little less than 14 billion years.  Whether it expires in a Big Crunch or subsides in a long Heat Death, many more billions of years stretch ahead.  We'll all be dead for far longer than our pre-birth non-existence.

 'Come on in. The water's fine.'

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