Now that I've turned in the novel, I can spend some time reading (an activity that for any writer is as important as hammering the keyboard). First up, Andy Duncan's fine collection of esoteric Americana, The Pottawatomie Giant and other Stories, and Samuel R Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders: enormous, enormously challenging because of its frank depictions of polymorphous perversity, thematically congruent with his examinations of the responsibilities of freedom in Trouble on Triton: an Ambiguous Heterotropia and Dhalgren, and a moving, beautifully humane story of a partnership that endures the hopes and hazards of the next seventy years.
Friday 27 July 2012
Monday 23 July 2012
Giant Steps Are What We Take
Posted on 08:58 by Unknown
It's forty-three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, but their footprints are still preserved in the lunar dust. In High-resolution images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter their tracks around the Lunar Module and the science packages they deployed show up as dark trails in the Lunar soil. With no wind or water to erode them, they'll last a long time, but not forever. Bombardment by micrometeorites will erode them at a rate of about a millimetre per million years; eventually, after ten to a hundred million years, they'll be ground down into the surrounding soil. Space archaeologists are already making plans to preserve them.
In his terrific new book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane describes walking alongside 5000 year old human footprints preserved in silt in Morecombe Bay. Volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania, preserved the footprints of Australopithecus afarensis individuals some 3.6 million years ago (there's a nice diorama of this in the New York Museum of Natural History). There are many trackways of dinosaurs much older, including 250 million year old prints left by a cat-sized dinosauromorph, an early ancestor of dinosaurs, preserved in what was once the mud of the floodplain of a large meandering river. And the oldest known animal tracks are around 585 million years old, created by a tiny, unknown, soft-bodied creature that's left no other trace. We humans have some way to go to match that record.
Friday 20 July 2012
Evening's Empires
Posted on 11:09 by Unknown
So I've been working on this novel, Evening's Empires, for the past 18 months, and I've just finished the final version. Or at least, the version that's sent to my editor (squirted down the tubes of the internet, rather than rehearsing the old rituals of realising that I'd run out of paper and/or laser-printer toner). After this, there will be the editor's comments to deal with (and, usually, another so-called polishing draft), and then the copy-edit, the proofs . . . But the part where I spend a long time alone in a room, trying to work out what my characters are doing, and why, is over. For this one, at least.
It's the fourth novel in the Quiet War series, and the last for a while. There are still stories to be told, I think, about the Black Fleet, the empire of the Trues, and ordinary life in the long golden age of the Great Expansion, but for now it's time for something else.
A few alternative titles:
Hari's Game
Kabadiwallah
The Last Voyage of Pabuji's Gift
Forgotten Things
Bring Me the Head of Dr Gagarian
These Ruins Are Inhabited
When the Saints
Human History
It's the fourth novel in the Quiet War series, and the last for a while. There are still stories to be told, I think, about the Black Fleet, the empire of the Trues, and ordinary life in the long golden age of the Great Expansion, but for now it's time for something else.
A few alternative titles:
Hari's Game
Kabadiwallah
The Last Voyage of Pabuji's Gift
Forgotten Things
Bring Me the Head of Dr Gagarian
These Ruins Are Inhabited
When the Saints
Human History
Monday 16 July 2012
This Thing's The Play . . .
Posted on 12:13 by Unknown
. . . that I wrote, with Anne Billson, Sean Hogan, Maureen McHugh, Stephen Volk, and ringmaster Kim Newman, who provided the frame and linkage for the five stories in the portmanteau piece. It's enormous fun to be part of this project; we've just done the read-through with a great bunch of actors, and now it's time to fine-tune for rehearsals. A very different experience from the usual sit-alone-in-a-room-in-front-of-a-screen stuff.
The Hallowe'en Sessions's run is 29 October - 3 November at the Leicester Square Theatre, London. Tickets £15 full price, £12 concessions, available for booking now. Here's the blurb:
A group of mental patients gather for a therapy session to each recount the terrifying events that caused them to lose their minds. But is their mysterious therapist all she appears to be, and will her course of treatment prove to be kill or cure?
Cigarette Burns and an award-winning team of horror/fantasy creators join forces to bring you a nightmarish evening filled with primal screams. Writers Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Moriarty – The Hound of the D’Urbervilles), Stephen Volk (The Awakening, Ghost Watch), Anne Billson (Suckers, Stiff Lips) Paul McAuley (Fairyland, The Quiet War trilogy), Maura McHugh (Jennifer Wilde, Róisín Dubh) and director Sean Hogan (The Devil’s Business, Little Deaths) take you on a head trip through the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where no one – least of all the audience – escapes with their nerves or sanity intact…
Friday 13 July 2012
Easy Travel To Other Worlds
Posted on 09:00 by Unknown
Just received in the post, my contributor's copy of John Joseph Adams' anthology Other Worlds Than These, a collection of tales of travels to and from other histories and alternate realities. It reprints my story, 'A Brief Guide To Other Histories', which shares the various interconnected histories of my novel Cowboy Angels. You can find out more about the anthology here, and more about my story in a brief interview, one of seventeen between the editor and contributors.
Meanwhile, the last draft of Evening's Empires (or at least, the last before it's fired off to its editor) moves on, from Tannhauser Gate to a wheel habitat at the outer edge of the Saturn System.
And here's something randomly lovely: a flash choir in New York's Times Square, singing a new composition by Philip Glass (who provided much of the soundtrack for Evening's Empires) in honour of his 75th birthday.
Wednesday 11 July 2012
Above Us Only Sky
Posted on 09:28 by Unknown
McLean Fahnestock made 'Grand Finale', a compilation of all 135 shuttle launches, almost a year ago; it was a finalist in the Remix category of the 2012 Vimeo video awards. It's a celebration of the visceral power of rocket technology, but it's also a requiem. Watch right until the end. This is how tragedy enters global awareness: a babbling chorus gradually falling away until only a single voice is left.
Monday 9 July 2012
Escape Routes
Posted on 05:34 by Unknown
[My story, 'The Choice' won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short story. I couldn't attend the award ceremony in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, kindly delivered this acceptance speech for me.]
When I was a teenager, living at the edge of a small town in the Cotswolds, England, I was a ferocious reader. And what I mostly read was science fiction. I read everything I could find in the public library, and in the library of my school (which possessed, for instance, a complete set of the works of H.G. Wells). And I spent a significant fraction of my pocket money on paperbacks, new and old. I hunted down caches of SF paperbacks in the backs of bookshops, on spinners in newsagent shops, in church sales. And every week I scoured the trays of cheap, imported paperbacks and magazines that the local Woolworths set out on one of its counters.
I still have a few of those Woolworths books. John Jakes’ The Asylum World. Clifford Simak’s All The Traps of Earth. And Theodore Sturgeon’s A Way Home, a Pyramid paperback edition of a short-story collection first published in the year that I was born, 1955, reprinted several times over the next decade.
The edition I have is the fourth printing, with the historically significant date July 1969. I suppose I bought it a year or two later. When I was 15, or 16. In 1970, or 1971. I’d read a lot of science fiction by then. I was, by then, deep into the New Wave - Michael Moorcock and Joanna Russ, Tom Disch and Samuel R Delany, Keith Roberts and M John Harrison. But I knew and loved Sturgeon’s work, and knew he was one of the authors on whose shoulders the New Wave guys were standing. And one of those stories in the collection, the title story, spoke to me in the way that short stories can sometimes speak to us. I felt a jolt of recognition, as I read it. A thump in the secret chambers of my heart.
It wasn’t just that the protagonist was a young kid named Paul, although I was still young enough for that to seem significant. And it wasn’t just that Paul, Paul Roundenbush, lived in a small town - in the Midwest, yes, and smaller and sleepier than my home town, but still. No, what really spoke to me was that, like me, Paul wanted to escape.
The story opens like this:
‘When Paul ran away from home, he met no one and saw nothing all the way to the highway.’
I wanted to leave home, too. I was 15, or maybe 16. Old enough to realise how small my home town was, to have some idea of the world beyond it. Like Paul Roundenbush I was a smart, strange, dreamy kid. A loner. And like a lot of smart, dreamy, lonely kids who feel out of place in the place they grew up in, I read a lot of science fiction. I’m sure that some of you feel a little jolt of recognition at this point.
In ‘A Way Home’, Paul, Paul Roundenbush, meets, or rather dreams of meeting, three possible future selves. They’re exactly the kind of men a lonely kid eager to escape his small town would dream of becoming. A millionaire with a glamourous wife and an expensive car and a glove box full of chocolate-covered cherries. A hobo who lives outside the law and has travelled the whole wide world. And an air ace exactly like a hero from a pulp story.
I never ran away, and neither does Paul Roundenbush, in the end, but with typically tender precision Sturgeon exactly nails the longing, the oceanic transcendental longing, of wanting to be somewhere else that almost all kids feel, at some point. That I felt, very strongly, then, in 1970 or 1971, in that small Cotswolds town, when I found the Pyramid paperback edition of A Way Home in the Woolworths tray, under a slew of Spicy Detective Story magazines and remaindered hardbacks.
Is it really science fiction, ‘A Way Home’? It was first published in a science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and Sturgeon was best known as a science-fiction writer. But because almost everything happens in Paul’s imagination, because its movement is small and close and personal, it reads as a straight literary story. Maybe it bounced from Colliers before finding a home in Amazing. Or from the Saturday Evening Post. But its theme is the theme of many science fiction stories. A yearning to move out, always further out. To become more than you are. And also the flipside of that yearning: the return home after long voyages to strange harbours, and knowing yourself, and where you came from, for the first time. As in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, for instance. Or James Blish’s short story ‘Watershed’. And many others.
I’ve published eighteen novels and more than eighty stories, and I know that it’s a theme that I’ve returned to over and again. It is, definitely, the theme of ‘The Choice’. Its young protagonist, Lucas, doesn’t want to leave home, does all he can to stay, until circumstances force him to make a hard decision. But I think that it shares, absolutely, the same concerns, the same movements of the human heart, as ‘A Way Home’.
And for that reason, beyond all the usual reasons, I’m amazingly proud and happy that ‘The Choice’ has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. I would like to thank Sheila Williams and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for publishing it, and the award’s judges for choosing it. And most of all I would like to thank Theodore Sturgeon, for his stories, for showing me how.
Thursday 5 July 2012
Militarisation
Posted on 05:10 by Unknown
Occasionally, one of my short stories is reprinted in an anthology. Here are the the latest two, both with a common theme. War & Space: Recent Combat, which reprints 'Rats of the System'. And SF Wars, which reprints 'Winning Peace'.
Oh, that perennial topic of SF, war. War as a condition of being human. Or of being intelligent. War as a plot device - a quick and dirty way of putting everything to hazard. Wars asserting human territoriality in a universe that frankly doesn't care - turning the entire solar system, or the entire galaxy, into a battlefield (now there's hubris). Wars fought on the assumption that western capitalism is the best and only model for civilisation that we have. Wars refighting Vietnam on bug planets. The twentieth century stamping its combat boot into the face of humanity, forever. It's heartening that a fair few of the stories in these collections argue against these assumptions, or don't take them at face value.
I seem to have been writing a fair bit about war, recently. Or rather, about failed attempts to avoid war, and about the aftermath of war. Readers of The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In The Mouth of the Whale will know that I'm not especially interested in generals and admirals, and the tactics of epic space battles. 'Rats of the System' is a quick little story about two mismatched people trying to escape an implacable pursuer; 'Winning Peace' is about two former enemies finding a common cause. And right now, I'm finishing a novel in a post-war, posthuman future without a space battle or space marine in sight. Heading out of the world-city Ophir to the semiautonomous free zone of Tannhauser Gate.
Tuesday 3 July 2012
Local Colour
Posted on 11:15 by Unknown
I've reached that stage, in the final push to finish Evening's Empires, where in addition to cutting cutting cutting I have to keep going into the office to jot down sentences that have to be inserted somewhere:
Most of her family were traders from Ceres and most of them were still there, she said, selling biologics to each other. 'My mother brought back dogs. Do you know dogs?'
Monday 2 July 2012
Caviar
Posted on 11:53 by Unknown
I'm very pleased to announce that my story, 'The Choice', has won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Congratulations to Charlie Jane Anders, and to Ken Liu, whose stories 'Six Days, Three Months', and 'The Paper Menagerie', won second and third place. The winners are selected each year by a jury of experts, from stories nominated by a wide range of reviewers, serious readers, and editors. I'm thrilled that they've chosen my story this year.
I won't be able to go to the award ceremony, over in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov's, which published 'The Choice', will accept on my behalf. I've been to Lawrence once before, way back in the twentieth century, when Fairyland won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It's a pretty intense experience. As well as the award ceremony, there's a short-story workshop, panels, and a visit to the University of Kansas's huge science-fiction library (enlarged since my visit by, amongst other things, Sturgeon's manuscripts and books). Fred Pohl, who's a jury member, and his wife, Betty Anne Hull, gave me a lift back to the airport. As we drove through endless fields of Kansas corn, I got Fred to sing a verse of 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'' - you know, the one about corn being as high as an elephant's eye. Science fiction takes you to places stranger than you can imagine.
If you're interested, you can read part of 'The Choice' for free, here. It's available in various Best SF collections, too, and will be including in an upcoming audio-book anthology.
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