Decaying To Mere Fact

Where do writers get their short-story ideas?  Seven years ago I was a speaker on a panel about the future, at an event organised by the Royal Society and the ICA.  You know: science and the arts.  One of the topics we kicked around was the synthesis of meat using some kind of nanotech device that would be as cheap and easy to use as a microwave.  Synthetic meat is hardly a new idea, in science fiction.  Vat-grown chicken helps to feed the overpopulated world of Fredrik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, published in 1953, for instance.  But there's an old rule of thumb that you can generate stories by thinking about who might be hurt or threatened by new technology, and when I was heading home after the event, walking past the bouncers outside a throbbing nightclub, it struck me that if celebrity stalkers found a use for cheap meat makers, then celebrities might need to take elaborate countermeasures.

I turned this notion into a short story that was published in Nature.  You can read it here.  Seven years later, a couple of things I stumbled across in the same week suggest that the future, or what I like to call the consensual present, has caught up with that little story.  First, there's the news that Madonna employs a sterilisation team, because she's worried about fans getting hold of her DNA.  And in an article on the manufacture of artificial meat, there's the following exchange between the author and a scientist:

"Could you make fake panda?"
"Sure."
"What about human?"
"Don't go there."

As far as I'm concerned, Madonna isn't paranoid, but prescient.

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Shortly Appearing

This Wednesday, I'm the guest at the monthly meeting of the British Science Fiction Association, where I'll be interviewed by award-winning critic Paul Kincaid.  It's free, starts at 7.00 pm, and takes place in the Cellar Bar of the Melton Mowbray pub, 18 Holborn, London.  There'll be a raffle, apparently; I'll bring some of my books, for prizes.  More details, and a map, here.

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Show Time

I'm not a huge fan of that commonplace tyranny of the writing manual, 'show don't tell.'  Avoid exposition and other forms of authorial narrative.  View scenes only through the camera of close third person.  Don't tell the reader that a character is brave, or foolhardy, or tired: show the character performing some action that illustrates the point.  Always dramatize.

Novels aren't movies, which unless they resort to clunky exposition in dialogue, are more or less all show.  But novels can use allusion and metaphor, condense time and action, generalise, describe internal psychological states.  And too often, in a novel, showing takes longer than telling.  'She was afraid' is better than 'She clasped her hands tightly together to stop them shaking.'  Neither are especially satisfactory, but at least the first is short and to the point.  (Of course, evoking the psychological state without resorting to physical symptoms is better still.)  Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with dramatisation, or the vivid illustrative action.  A narrative that explains everything leaves no room for the reader; it would be as tedious as a story in which every action is described, moment by moment.  And it's important to keep the character in focus, to see and feel a scene through her eyes, her reactions.

Something I'm reminding myself page by page, paragraph by paragraph, as I press on with the final draft of Evening's Empires.  Here, for instance, is a pretty bad bit of tell not show:

Tamonash Pilot, Hari’s uncle, his father’s younger brother, was about the same age now as Aakash had been when he’d passed over.  A stocky old man with a hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, dressed in simple black coveralls, so closely resembling Aakash that it was a shock to see him waiting in the bustle and flow of the elevator terminal.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this, but what's especially wrong is that I'm not only telling myself what's happening, using information the protagonist doesn't yet know, but I'm telling it back to front. My first drafts are, shamefully, littered with place-holders like this.  This is closer to a final version:

When he followed Bo out of the booming elevator from the docks, Hari saw his father standing in the bustle and flow of the dispersing passengers.  A stocky old man with the familiar hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, but clean-shaven, dressed in black coveralls.  Smiling now, holding out his hands, saying, ‘Gajananvihari!  Nephew!  How good it is to meet you at last!  I am Tamonash.  Welcome to Down Town.  Welcome to Ophir.’

Followed by a chunk of exposition that gets past the whole awkward and overly-familiar getting-to-know-you scene as quickly as possible.  I guess the main rule is, whatever works.

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Travellers' Tales

I've just sold a story to editor Jonathan Strahan's Edge of Infinity, an anthology of tales set in various versions of a settled, industrialised Solar System.  Mine, 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Field' shares the setting of the Quiet War future history: a trio of tall stories framed by a journey from Egypt to Saturn's moon Dione, made by a woman invited to memorialise her dead father.  Not quite the last Quiet War fiction.  This week I've been on Vesta and its artificial moon; next week I'll be in the world city, Ophir, as I slowly fine-tune the last draft of Evening's Empires.  Another traveller's tale.  Science fiction is a literature of the restless and displaced.

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Just Not Evenly Distributed

From an interview with Edward Burtynsky:

Manaugh: ... From the point of view of a photographer, then, it might seem equally interesting that there are now all sorts of new types of photographic systems on the rise -- quadcopter-mounted 3D scanners, drones, and even smart ammunition equipped with cameras that can loiter in an area taking aerial photographs. Simply on a technical level, I'm curious about where you see the future of photography going. Do you see a time when you're not going to be riding in a helicopter over Los Angeles but, instead, piloting a little drone that's flying around up there and taking photographs for you?

Burtynsky: I'm already doing it.

Twilley: You have a drone?

Burtynsky: Yeah.

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Cover Art - Five Novelisations

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We Are The Dead

The problem with adapting novels for film is usually what to leave out.  At first sight, David Cronenberg's solution for his adaptation of Don DeLillo's short novel Cosmopolis is to leave everything in.  And that's part of the problem; but the other part is the small yet crucial detail that Cronenberg does omit.

Before you read any further, by the way, there are spoilers ahead.  Massive, unavoidable SPOILERS.
 
In both novel and film, young hotshot billionaire Eric Packer decides to get a haircut, starting an odyssey across New York's grid, which, jammed by the motorcade of the US President, the funeral cortege of a Muslim rapper, and an anti-capitalist protest that culminates in a riot in Times Square, increasingly resembles the Hunger City of David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'.  Packer observes this human chaos from the coffin of his cork-lined (prousted), fully-equipped limousine, where he tracks his attempt to buy as much of the world's supply of yuan (yen, in the novel) as possible and receives visits from various experts who work for him, and an intimate medical examination.  Excursions include sexual dalliances with his art dealer and one of his bodyguards, a visit to a rave, and several encounters with his new, independently-wealthy wife.  Meanwhile, his currency speculation goes monstrously awry, and it becomes clear that someone wants to kill him.

Robert Patterson, formerly the world's most famous vampire, imbues Packer with a glacial, otherworldly glamour that reminded me more than a little of David Bowie's stranded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth.  Another person trapped in the consequences of their meddling with the controls of the capitalist world-machine.  He spends most of the first half of the film wearing sunglasses, but even without them his gaze is inscrutable, barely human.  He's the epitome of capitalism, a maths whiz who made his money in the dot-com boom and parlayed it into a stratospheric fortune by playing the money markets with strategies most can't follow.  The kind of omnicompetent hero usually found in science-fiction novels, armoured by his wealth against the consequences of his manipulations, issuing demands to minions to purchase whatever catches his eye (he has already bought a Russian nuclear bomber; he wants to buy the Rothko chapel and install it in his apartment; there's room, apparently, next to the shooting range).  For much of the film, Packer and the camera are locked together inside the limousine while the New York streets flow past like glimpses of an alien planet on a spaceship's viewscreens.  In one of the best scenes, Packer and his theorist (played by Samantha Morton with just the right touch of steely eccentricity; all of the actors give fine performances) exchange quips and observations while waves of rioters break against the limo, but fail to do little more than cover it in graffiti scribble and tilt the level of the cocktail in Packer's glass.

Those quips and observations . . .  They're lifted straight from the pages of the novel, but they don't really work, as film dialogue.  Like Harold Pinter, DeLillo's dialogue puts its own spin on the repetition and circling flow of 'realistic' dialogue.  But while Pinter's dialogue, on the stage, is like a flurry of punches, DeLillo's, on the screen, is more like a kind of intellectual ping-pong.  The characters are far smarter than us, but the things they say aren't the things that people far smarter than us would say.  In the novel, this works, sort of, as a kind of parody of Packer's isolation from the actual world detachment.  It's all very postmodern, irony ironising itself with a knowing wink.  In the film, despite the best attempts by the actors to give it life, it often doesn't connect.  The characters don't connect with each other; the audience doesn't connect with the characters.  Its abiding flaw isn't pretentiousness, exactly; I admire Cronenberg's audacity in trying to portray the mindset of someone who has lost contact with the ordinary world and is, maybe, trying to find his way back in.  No, it's that Cronenberg doesn't make us care about the characters, or what's happening to them.  When Packer throws himself against the slopes of the man-mountain who gives him the news of the rapper's death, we don't believe his grief.  When his wife tells him she wants a divorce, we wonder how she managed to stick it out for so long.

And when Packer finally gets to the quaint old neighbourhood barbershop where he used to get his hair cut as a kid, while his driver and the barber bond over shared experiences driving cabs in NYC, Packer remains aloof.  Okay, the scene which satisfies his child-like concern about where limousines go, at night, is touching, but this delicacy is shattered by a botched volley from his would-be killer, a lead-in to the last twenty minutes, trapped now in a derelict room piled with dead cathode-ray monitors and other kibble rather than a high-spec limo and its icy blue touch-screens, while Packer and his murderer (Paul Giamatti, hooded with a ratty towel like a hobo monk) interrogate each others' motives, and the film finally gains a dimension of suspense.

And here's the thing that Cronenberg elided.  Not Packer's motive for destroying everything he's created, but his state of mind, at the end.  Or rather, his state of grace.  In the novel, in the first pages of the novel, we're told that Packer can't sleep.  That sleep eludes him.  'Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five.'  When he reaches that barbershop, in the novel, he not only touches base with who he once was, but he finds a place of safety.  A place where he can, and briefly does, sleep.  And after he wakes, when he's riding in the limousine again, he finds a film-shoot where several hundred naked people, in the style of Spencer Tunick, imitate the victims of some atrocity.  And he joins them, and finds his wife, and, it's made clear, in the novel, also finds himself.  In the film, his willed self-destruction is an extension of his megalomania.  In the novel, it becomes something else, something more like human life, rounded with a sleep.

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Dead Futures

We're remaking the future all the time, here in the present.  As you grow older, you begin to lose track of the number of times you've seen what seemed like a solid, unchangeable, unchallengeable future murdered by what we later call history. I can think of at least four or five major hinge points in my lifetime, but I'm sure that many more, large and small, have flipped our timeline in unexpected directions.

Kennedy's assassination was the first big global news event I remember (sitting in front of the fire on a damp Saturday evening in November, hearing the BBC radio news report, aged 8, while my mother was ironing the weekly wash (here's a later TV bulletin on the same day)), but a couple of years before that Kennedy and Khrushchev had narrowly avoided a global nuclear war during the Cuba crisis and a future grimmer by far than any we've lived through.

The Apollo 11 moon landing killed every future with easy travel to other planets stone dead. As soon as Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar dust, the political point of the enterprise had been made.  Half a dozen missions followed, more or less because the hardware was in place, but that was it for manned space travel beyond Low Earth Orbit in the Twentieth Century. No wheel space station, no mission to Mars or beyond, none of the cool stuff in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Twenty years later, Germans were standing on top of the Berlin Wall, the beginning of the domino collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War and hundreds of fictional futures in which the US and Russia were locked in perpetual struggle.  And on 9/11 in the real 2001, the future was changed again, and we're still dealing with the effects.  Maybe the Arab Spring will be another game changer; as Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said when asked about the changes caused by the French Revolution, it's too soon to say.

Apollo 11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 were all enacted live, on television, which is how we get our history these days.  That, and Twitter and other social platforms.  'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,' Roy Batty says, at the beginning of his soliloquy in Bladerunner. So have we all, Roy, without leaving our homes. That's a game-changer, too.

And these days everything in the world is connected to everything else.  You're a mouse click away from Armstrong's first footstep, or Times Square (as I type this, in London, it's raining, in Times Square). Less than two years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, a couple of hundred kilometres to the north of the Berlin Wall [EDIT, actually about five hundred kilometres southwest], in CERN, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web site.  The World Wide Web rendered thousands of fictional futures redundant, but created thousands more.  And that's the thing, if you're a science fiction writer.  Every future you create will be undermined by history sooner or later.  Usually sooner.  But science fiction isn't  - or shouldn't be - in the prophesy game.  It can be about realistic futures, but it isn't especially into realism.  It can parody present trends or inflate them into widescreen phantasies; it can contrast human stories with the pitiless scale of the universe. Most of all, it can tell us in as many ways as possible that the future will be different, wilder and stranger than we can imagine.

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Update

So I've finished writing a couple of short stories, and the first draft of something for a secret project I'm not allowed to tell you about, quite yet. And now it's back to the novel, and the final pass before I send it off to my agent and my editor; this is the draft where every sentence is interrogated and everything that doesn't carry weight is cut, otherwise known as the slaughter of the darlings.

Meanwhile, you can find a new short story of mine, 'The Man', in the second issue of Arc Magazine, and another story, 'Antarctica Starts Here', is scheduled for publication in, I think, the October/November issue of Asimov's SF. And I've contributed a chapter to the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse. Fightback!, due out in December.

This Saturday (the 9th), I'll be travelling to Cardiff to take part in the British Humanist Association's annual conference, where I'll be talking with Professor Gregory Claeys about the future. And later in the month, on Wednesday 27th, I'll be interviewed at the monthly meeting of the British Science Fiction Association, in the Cellar Bar of The Melton Mowbray Public House. 18 Holborn, London (map here). Entry is free, and non-members are welcome.

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One Of Those Days In England With The Country Goin' Broke

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