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Sunday, 27 February 2011

Debatable Zones

Posted on 02:43 by Unknown
As an exercise, the reader might like to substitute 'science fiction' and 'sf writers' for 'poetry' and 'poets' in the following:
The edgelands are a complex landscape, a debatable zone, constantly reinventing themselves as economic and social tides come in and out. Of course, the idea of edgelands does not just refer to parts of the physical landscape. It's a rich term for poetry, too, and can maybe break down other dualities. Poets have always been attracted to the overlooked, the telling details, the captured moment. And the moment is important here, too. If parts of remote rural Britain feel timeless (though this feeling is, of course, illusory) then the edgelands feel anything but. Revisit an edgelands site you haven't seen for six months, and likely as not there will be a Victorian factory knocked down, a business park newly built, a section of waste ground cleared and landscaped, a re-war warehouse abandoned and open to the elements [or a Zeppelin factory swarming with zombies - PM]. Such are the constantly shifting sands of edgelands that any writing about these landscapes is a snapshot.  There is no definitive description of the edgelands of Swindon, or Wolverhampton, only an attempt to celebrate and evoke them at one particular time.

Edgelands: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
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Friday, 25 February 2011

Books Do Furnish A Room

Posted on 09:52 by Unknown
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Thursday, 24 February 2011

Rereading

Posted on 10:06 by Unknown
So SFSignal asked me: What books/stories do you feel are just as good now as they were when you first read them?

My answer below; answers from other people here.

Any book worth its salt should be able to withstand a second reading, but there are some that excite and move me at every reencounter. Here are a few:

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. A man finds himself stranded on a traffic island after a car crash. At first he can’t escape. And then he doesn’t want to. A powerful, deceptively simple updating of the Robinson Crusoe story.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. A man comes to a wounded American city, leaves as a hero-poet. After the fall of New Orleans, it’s more relevant than ever.

Libra by Don DeLillo. Oswald as tragic hero.

Neuromancer by William Gibson.  Still fresh and startlingly original, despite a thousand imitators.

The Inheritors by William Golding. Neanderthals encounter modern humans, with fatal results. All of Golding is worth reading and rereading, but this is my favourite.

Climbers by M. John Harrison. A beautifully written, intricately structured memoir/novel about memory, obsession, and the unrelenting reality of the world.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Diagrammatic, yes, but the sections set on Anarres are truly powerful and moving, and it’s one of the few SF novels to attempt to portray a genuinely original society from the inside.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. America primeval.

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. Alyx, a barbarian kidnapped by the future, leads a gang of squabbling tourists across an alien wilderness. Alyx is the template for every wisecracking kickass heroine in cyberpunk, the new space opera and much else, but she’s the original and best, tough and funny and tender and wise.

Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. The detailed life and times of Updike’s American Everyman are, like America itself, inexhaustible.

The Once and Future King
by T.H. White. A marvellously eccentric fantasy about King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Matter of Britain that begins as a juvenile comedy and ends in tragedy and renewal. The death of Beaumont gets me every time. And no one does infodumps like White, who seems to know everything about Medieval Britain, which he remakes into a world that never was but should have been.


Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. The fall of America, as told to her diary by a young girl. The best, and chronologically the first, of Womack’s Ambient sequence.

So, which books do you recommend?
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Tuesday, 22 February 2011

City of the Dead

Posted on 06:39 by Unknown

Just up on amazon in both the UK and the US, at as reasonable a price I could manage, the Kindle ebook edition of a recent science-fiction novelette, City of the Dead. My first but by no means last venture in e-publishing.  Cover by Michael Marshall Smith; no DRM. Enjoy!
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Monday, 21 February 2011

Imagination

Posted on 08:05 by Unknown
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Friday, 18 February 2011

Reality

Posted on 01:30 by Unknown
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Thursday, 17 February 2011

Reminder #2

Posted on 02:22 by Unknown
Along with fellow guests of honour Juliet McKenna and Kari Sperring, I'll be at the small but perfectly formed one-day convention Picocon this Saturday.  If you see me, say hello.

Slowly working on the new novel, meanwhile, and thinking about a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', that jumped into my head the other day.  In the way they do, sometimes.
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Monday, 14 February 2011

Reminder #1

Posted on 08:35 by Unknown
...that with Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod I'll be speaking and taking part in a roundtable discussion at the LSE Thursday 17th. It's a free event (but you need to book tickets) organised by the Department of International Relations as part of the university's Space for Thought Literary Festival.
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Friday, 11 February 2011

Book Stack

Posted on 09:40 by Unknown

Here are a few of the books I bought in the past couple of weeks (the paperback pile is about twice as high). From the top:

D.G. Compton, Ascendancies and Farewell, Earth's Bliss. Compton is a highly underrated British SF writer, probably best known for The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, which anticipated reality TV and was made into a so-so film, Death Watch, by Bernard Tavernier. Farewell, Earth's Bliss is somewhat atypical - a darkly funny story of redemption set on Mars, used by Earth as a dumping ground for the worst kind of criminal. Ascendancies, like many of Compton's novels, views a near-future society in close-up, through flawed protagonists. Here, a widow and a hapless insurance agent try to out-game each other in a near future transformed by falls of fertilising dust and random disappearances of people via a mysterious process associated with eerie choral music and the scent of roses.

T.M. Disch, The Prisoner. Novelisation of the cult TV series. Disch and The Prisoner are a closer fit than you might at first think.

Stephen Hall, The Raw Shark Texts. Charity shop find, shortlisted for the Clarke Award a couple of years back. Adventures in Un-Space.

Stanislaw Lem, Eden. Secondhand bookshop find. A spaceship crashes on a planet of metaphors.

Jack Womack, Ambient. Womack's first novel, the third, chronologically, in his 'Dryco' series. Uncannily prophetic social satire; opens with one of the best bookshop scenes ever written.

The Ones You Do, Daniel Woodrell. Signed first edition of the third of Woodrell's St Bruno mystery novels (I bought the other two, Under the Bright Lights and Muscle for the Wing, in a sale at the fabulous Powell Books, Portland, Oregon, a few years ago).  Woodrell is one of my favourite writers, a poet of American interstitial lowlife. His second novel, Woe to Live On, was made into a film (Ride With the Devil), as was his last, Winter's Bone.
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Wednesday, 9 February 2011

Making It Personal

Posted on 10:08 by Unknown

Simon asks a question that I think is too good to be left under the fold:
Something has been bothering me for sometime about Sci-Fi and you seem the kinda guy to shed some light on it. How come Sci-Fi writers before recent times never mentioned/envisaged personalised settings in technology (you know - screen savers, font, pictures - things that reflect/feedback ones personality in objects). It seems that even the greatest kept faith with the idea of mass homogenised technologies which were no doubt linked to the ideas of societies and objects in the post industrial age. I mean it would have been nice if Rick Deckard would have played around with the personalized settings of his mood organ? I think personalised settings say a lot about notions of liberty, society and people’s interaction with technology – seems an under explored area (you just gonna tell me that I’ve simply just missed all the right books?!!)
 I have not one but three answers. And a question.

First - and I know I've said it before- science fiction really isn't in the prediction business. What it really does is hold up a distorting mirror to the time in which it is written, and takes current directions and preoccupations and speculates wildly about them. It doesn't predict the future, but a rich variety of possible futures.  Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets it wrong, as in the example at the top of this post - Kelly Freas's terrific painting of a space pirate swarming aboard a rocketship with a slide rule between his teeth.

Second, modern science fiction came of age in the post-war years, when techniques of mass production deployed during the Second World War began to spew all kinds of consumer goods. The growth of the American military-industrial complex in the 1950s and 1960s not only produced the largest and most modern armed force in the world, it also stimulated a huge increase in civilian living standards. SF written at the time reflected that, often in satirical, dehumanised dystopias: Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451; Fredrick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants; much of Philip K Dick's work. Deckard's mood organ doesn't have personalised settings because that's the point: it's a machine for standardising human emotions in a future where the line between real and artificial human beings is confused.

But has any science fiction explored personalisation of technology? You bet. Much of cyberpunk explores the way in which technology can be subverted and repurposed.  'The street,' William Gibson famously wrote in his short story 'Burning Chrome', 'finds its own uses for things.' My question is this: what's the earliest example of personalised technology in science fiction? In the stories in Larry Niven's future history, published in the 1960s and 1970s, asteroid miners personalised their space suits with paintings (much as vans and motorcycles were customised, back then). But there must be earlier examples . . .
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Sunday, 6 February 2011

Palimpsest

Posted on 01:37 by Unknown
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      • Debatable Zones
      • Books Do Furnish A Room
      • Rereading
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