N.B.

Aside from the odd photo and the weekly links page, I'll be blogging very infrequently for the next four weeks. I want to get a good portion of the second draft of the new novel done (and wouldn't mind finishing a short story, too), I have a business problem to resolve, and I need a holiday.  (Yes, I was just in Spain as a guest of the very good, hugely relaxed Celsius 232 festival, and had a terrific time in great company, but I'm planning a few days away that have nothing at all to do with the writing biz.)

Meanwhile, there are reviews of Evening's Empires here and here, and there's a Q&A conducted by my publishers about my first 25 years as a novelist over here. And at some point I'll post links to a book give-away . . .

[edit] Oh yes, and I've reviewed Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Links 09/08/13

'In 2015, a clone will spend a year on the International Space Station while his doppelgänger remains on Earth. Mark and Scott Kelly, the only identical twins who are also astronauts, have volunteered themselves for study, creating a unique opportunity to disentangle the health effects of space from those of genetics.'

Mars Explorer Barbie.

One day in the Solar System.

Recycling bins in London harvest MAC addresses from the smart phones of passers-by, identify the type of phone they're carrying, and track their movements.

'To honor the anniversary of Warhol’s birthday, August 6, 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam launched a collaborative project titled Figment, a live feed of Warhol's gravesite.'

Concept design for a robot that erases concrete buildings.

A beautiful minimalist Periodic Table.

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There Are Doors (20)

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Don't Prophesy With Your Pen

The Los Angeles Review of Books recently published an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, conducted by Tod Mesirow in 1995, that opens with a useful reminder that the one thing people associate with science fiction isn't the kind of thing that science fiction actually does. Asked why science fiction seems so prescient, Clarke says:

'Well, we musn't overdo this, because science fiction stories have covered almost every possibility, and, well, most impossibilities — obviously we're bound to have some pretty good direct hits as well as a lot of misses. But, that doesn't matter. Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says what if? — not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere — flying, space travel, all these things, but even there we missed really badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds had been — my late friend, Isaac Asimov, for example, had — but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd probably have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.'

Every science-fictional future sooner or later becomes an alternate history. Even those set in the near future, and which attempt to guess with reasonable accuracy what life will be like in, say, 2015, 2016. Especially those, actually. And the further away your story is set, the more likely it is that some 9/11 will send history hurtling off in an unexpected direction (someone once wrote a science-fictional trilogy about this). Even those science fictions which may have gotten some part of our present (their future) more or less right didn't predict it: they anticipated it. As Hero anticipated the steam engine (but not the Industrial Revolution). Or to put it another way, claiming that science fiction predicts the future is to unremember all the things it got wrong. And claiming that science fiction has failed to predict the ubiquity of, say, mobile phones and Angry Birds fails to understand what science fiction is actually about.

Which includes, yes, extrapolation.  But also includes a lot more, including wild and irresponsible speculation, satire of some present trend, dreams of utopias, nightmares of dystopias . . . The future is a blank page. It doesn't yet exist. Its worlds may be self-consistent, may be strongly rooted in our present, but they are not representations of reality. They are experiments questioning reality, testing its limits, asking awkward questions about it. So much more interesting that dull, dutiful prognostication.

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Links 26/07/13

The glowing blue wave of death: '...an international team of researchers has found evidence of a “cascade” of death that spreads through an animal’s body through a special necrosis pathway, leaving a wake of dead cells in its procession, until the entire system collapses and expires. In the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, this wave of bodily destruction originates in the intestine and is accompanied by an intense burst of blue fluorescence when viewed with a camera equipped with a high brightness fluorescence filter cube, which allowed the researchers to visualize the worm’s destruction, the team reports in the journal PLoS Biology.'

'A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.'


A gallery of images of ants at war.

Brock Davis's Cucumber Killer Whale and Historic Explosions in Cauliflower.

The International Space Station photographed in transit across the Sun and the Moon.

The Earth imaged from Saturn.

The Earth and the Moon imaged from Mercury.

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jCp

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jC

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

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All Best

Published today, the 30th volume of Gardner Dozois' annual selection of the year's best science fiction stories.  It includes two stories by me, but don't let that put you off.  Gardner says: 'Every year is special, because every year good new writers come along, and every year the older writers continue to do really good work. It's exciting to watch the field evolve, and I don't think the overall level of literary quality in science fiction has ever been higher-and I've been watching the field for a long time.'

Some fun facts:
Annual editions of this anthology have been published continuously since 1984. At a rough count, the series as a whole has contained about 9,500,000 words of fiction, by hundreds of different authors. It has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology seventeen times, more than any other anthology series in history. Gardner Dozois has won fifteen Hugo Awards as Year's Best Editor, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Robert Silverberg said of the series 'The Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the history of the science-fiction short story' and called it "a wondrous treasure trove of great stories and an archive that has immeasurable historical significance." George R.R. Martin said 'The best that science fiction has to offer, chosen by the most respected editor in the field.  A copy belongs on the shelf of every SF reader.'

 The table of contents can be found here.

Also out today from Infinivox, the fifth edition of Allan Kaster's audiobook anthology, The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction. Which, yes, includes one of my stories. More details about the anthology and its contents here. Oh, and it's also available as an ebook on Kindle and Nook.

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Drafted

So I've just finished the first draft of the new novel, emitting a spurt of around 3500 words in a rattling crescendo this morning. I don't, as I've noted elsewhere, tend to follow a detailed outline with absolute fidelity, planning out every beat and then making sure that they are all ticked off in the right place. Instead, I have a rough shape, and a few notable features I know I need to visit, and a place where I think I'm going to end up, but everything between is a process of discovery. In other words, I do more of my thinking about writing while I'm writing than before I start.

As I try to keep rewriting to a minimum as I go along, preferring to keep a steady pace, to keep moving forward, the first draft is usually fairly messy, with contradictions and abrupt introductions of important points (although not, oddly, of important characters - they are the one thing I do think about before I begin). It doesn't matter. Everything can be fixed in the rewrites (and I have already accumulated a fair number of notes for the second draft). And sometimes it is important to fail. To find the way that leads forward by trying other ways first.

Anyway, I'm just back from signing copies of Evening's Empires in Forbidden Planet's London branch. I have to deal with the copy-edit of the reissue of the Confluence trilogy before I head out to Spain for the Celsius232 Festival. And then I'll begin again with the new novel, at the beginning.

The title of this one, by the way, is Something Coming Through. It's about aliens, and second chances.

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Links 20/07/13

Chuck Wendig - So, You Just Had Your Book Published.  Ha ha ha. Oh.

'An intelligent knife that knows when it is cutting through cancerous tissue is being tested in three London hospitals.'

'Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.'

'A few Septembers back, on a Saturday afternoon, I took a long drive, from a leafy neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, to the remotest parts of the outer solar system. I set out from Cambridge in a dusty, rented Volkswagen, with my co-pilot Andrew Youdin, a planet-formation theorist from the University of Colorado at Boulder. We drove north to Maine, aiming for Aroostook County, where, stretched along close to 100 miles of small towns, big farms and empty highway, you’ll find the world’s largest three-dimensional scale model of the solar system.'

Fly through a canyon on Mars.

Phobos over Mars.

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Cover Space

Publishers spend a lot of time trying to get covers right: industry wisdom has it that a great cover snags the attention of casual browsers and boosts sales. That may change, if online sales of deadtree and ebooks continue to increase (although books will still need smart covers to stand out in those 'customers also bought these titles' ID parades), but at the moment, catching and holding that casual glance is one of the key parts of book marketing.

I think I've been pretty lucky with the covers for my Quiet War novels:

By Sidonie Beresford-Browne for the Gollancz hardcover/trade paperback covers, they are amongst my all-time favourites (and the cover of the US editions of the Pyr editions of The Quiet War and The Gardens of the Sun are pretty good too). But I'm aware that while spaceships and planets may be catnip to genre fans, they can be hugely powerful deterrents that underscore innate prejudices about the other-worldly skiffy nonsense for readers who aren't much acquainted with science fiction, or think they don't like it. Spaceships are, to many people, signifiers of brash escapism rather than serious intent.

As, indeed, can be any kind of painterly illustration. As Tim Kreider pointed out in a recent article in The New Yorker, 'children’s books, Y.A. literature, and genre fiction still have license to beguile their readers with gorgeous cover illustrations, but mature readers aren’t supposed to require such enticements. For serious literature to pander to us with cosmetic allurements would be somehow tacky, uncool.'

Kreider has some very smart things to say about what makes a good cover, and why so many covers look the same, and why the new minimalism is not always a good thing. He's a cartoonist, so his insights on cover design come from a different, sharper angle than those of most authors. He also celebrates the covers of science-fiction novels he read as a teenager, and his examples are good ones. So it's unfortunate that they're labelled (perhaps not by Kreider - I certainly hope not) as 'silly book covers'.  There were, and still are, plenty of terrible genre covers thrown together in haste with little skill or attention. But while the psychedelia of, say a Richard Powers' cover from the 1970s may be quaint, it isn't silly. It's the kind of thing that was, as Kreider points out, designed to wow. The problem is that not everyone wants to be wowed:

For serious literature to pander to us with cosmetic allurements would be somehow tacky, uncool. The more important a book is, the less likely there is to be anything at all on its cover (look at most editions of “Ulysses”). Even the ancient equivalents of summer blockbusters like Homer and “Beowulf” or the sex romps and gorefests of Shakespeare tend to get stodgy public-domain paintings on their covers. There are actual marketing hazards to making your book look too enjoyable—I wrote sixty-thousand-some words of prose, but because I threw in half a dozen cartoons and put a funny drawing on the cover, my would-be literary essays often get shelved in Graphic Novels or Humor. 

In UK SFF publishing, there are ongoing attempts at cross-over appeal with some titles, deploying bold graphics, reissuing classics in plainer covers, and so on. Gollancz have just produced a terrific example for Simon Ings' new novel, for instance. But most genre novels still have some kind of painterly representational element because that's what twangs the pleasure centres of genre fans. And novels set in space often still have spaceships on their covers, even if they're mostly about other things. And while they're no longer as boldly monolithic as those examples from 1970s British paperbacks I posted recently while they may be reduced to graphics, as in The Quiet War cover above, or depicted with delicate realism, as in the paperback cover of Al Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth, they're still spaceships, with all that entails.


That the kind of imaginative literature that builds on the great collective triumphs of science can be judged and dismissed because of its covers is a great shame. Not only because (of course) I want my books to be read as widely as possible, but also because it's kind of sad that here in the strange and unpredictable maelstrom of the twenty-first century people cling to the straight realism of modernism like ship-wrecked sailors, as if it is still the only way by which we can make sense of the world and the capabilities of the human mind.

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Evening's Empires

Happy birthday, little book.

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Out There

Last week my British publisher, Gollancz, dropped the price of the ebook version of The Quiet War to £1.99, to help promote the publication of Evening's Empires, the fourth novel in the Quiet War universe. Some American readers wanted to know whether they could get in on the deal, and I realised, to my chagrin, that I didn't know. So I thought it might be useful to make a list of what is available in the UK and the US - to keep things simple, I'll skirt around the more complicated issue of translations for now. Some of this information is available in the sidebar, by the way, but not all of it. So this, by way of clarification, is what's current as far as the Anglo-American axis goes:

First, in the UK, the following novels are definitely available as deadtree books:

Evening's Empires
In The Mouth of the Whale
Gardens of the Sun
The Quiet War
Cowboy Angels

Five titles from my back list - Four Hundred Billion Stars, Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland - may still be available as paperbacks, but are I think mostly out of print.

All of the above are also available as ebooks in the UK. The rest of my back list as at present out of print, but I have plans to revive several titles as ebooks.

A short story collection, A Very British History, was published by PS Publishing in March, and is very much in print. And a single-volume anthology of the Confluence trilogy, with two associated stories tipped in, will be published by Gollancz in December.

In the US, only Gardens of the Sun, The Quiet War and Cowboy Angels are available as deadtree books. (Three other titles are still under contract with Tor, but have long been out of print, and haven't been turned into ebooks because, amongst other reasons, Tor have a vast pre-ebook-era backlist.) They are also available as ebooks - but as I discovered, they aren't available as the British versions. That's because I have a different publisher, Pyr, in the US, and while Gollancz was briefly able to release its ebook versions in the US, that ended when they sold US rights to Pyr. And that's why, I'm afraid, the price of The Quiet War hasn't dropped in the US: it's a special offer on the British ebook associated with a new novel coming out from my British publisher.

The five back list titles mentioned above are available as ebooks in the US, by the way, because I took back the rights after they went out of print in the US, and offered them to Gollancz. If you're confused at this point, I don't blame you.


Availability of books still reflects the old territories carved out by publishers in different countries.  British publishers claim the UK and most Commonwealth countries; US publishers the US and Canada. Back in the day, US readers would not have expected US editions of books to reflect the pricing of editions in British bookshops. Now that the internet connects everyone with everyone else, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine that someone in the US should be able to download a British edition of an ebook; but rights and territories, and the geolocatory vigilance of platforms like Amazon, prevent that.


Neither In the Mouth of the Whale or Evening's Empires have a US publishing deal.  At present, if American readers want to buy either novel, I can do no more than point them towards the Book Depository, which sells deadtree books with free worldwide shipping. And if they want the ebook versions, then I'm afraid it won't be possible (outwith spoofing your location) unless and until an American publisher buys the rights, or until Gollancz decides it can't sell them.

However, there are a few other ebooks which are available in both the US and UK (and in Canada and elsewhere). These are titles I published myself to Kindle Direct, including the stories 'City of the Dead'[, 'Dr Pretorious and the Lost Temple', and 'Prisoners of the Action', the short story collection Little Machines (originally published by PS publishing), and two collections of Quiet War short stories, Stories From The Quiet War and the latest, published just last week, Life After Wartime.

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Links 13/07/13

The first exoplanet observed in colour is blue. Because of rains of molten glass.

New Horizons spacecraft spots Pluto and Charon.

Colorized History presents a terrific portrait of Charles Darwin.

Perspective view of the flanks of Olympus Mons, Mars.

All the pie and coffee in Twin Peaks:

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Möbius Ship

Gajananvihari Pilot, the hero of Evening's Empires was born on a spaceship and spends most of his life aboard it; he escapes when it is hijacked, and his efforts to get it back form the spine of the novel's narrative. Because it's at the centre of the story, I wanted to make his ship distinctive, so gave it a (literal) twist.

It was a ring ship, Pabuji’s Gift, a broad ribbon caught in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units...

I drew inspiration (novelist's jargon for 'pretty much lifted the idea') from Californian artist Tim Hawkinson's extraordinary Möbius Ship, which I stumbled across in the wilds of the internet while I was planning the novel:

'...a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale.'

At least, I though that was the entirety of my inspiration. But a couple of weeks ago, while I was looking for spaceship art on the covers of paperbacks on my double-stacked bookshelves, I found an image of a twisted town by artist John Berkey which may very well be an ancestor of Gajananvihari Pilot's ring ship:

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Quiet War Offer

To celebrate next week's publication of Evening's Empires, the fourth novel set in the Quiet War universe, my publishers have temporarily slashed the price of the ebook of the first, The Quiet War. It's available on Kindle, iTunes, and hopefully elsewhere.

EDIT: My fault for not making this clear - this is an offer by Gollancz, associated with the publication of Evening's Empires in the UK next week. Unfortunately, the Gollancz ebook doesn't appear to be available in the US, where The Quiet War has a different publisher. Sorry about that. But if you follow me on Twitter there will be a competition next week, and anyone can enter.

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The Master

The head doctor pointed Hari towards an ascetic hermit, reputedly the holiest man in the city.  He lived in a tree, one of the big coral trees that shaded the broad boulevard that circled the edge of the highest and largest of Ophir’s terraces.  He had not touched the ground for more than forty years.  He chewed the tree’s alkaloid-rich seeds and leaves and spoke with gods and monsters.  People made donations of food and water which he drew up in the same bucket he used to dispose of his wastes.

Hari and Rav stepped through circles of offerings and prayers spread around the tree. Hundreds of dip candles flickered in the green shade.  Aromatic smoke curled from incense sticks jammed into the rough bark of its branches and trunk.

‘You could leave the book here,’ Rav said.

‘I have to explain how I came by it,’ Hari said. ‘I have to explain my debt.’

He joined a small queue of penitents and paid a fee to a steward, who told him that he could have exactly ten minutes in the holy presence, inclusive of the time it took to climb up to him.

‘Those of true faith fly up the tree,’ the steward said. ‘Those who are merely curious find the way harder.  So balance and harmony are achieved.’

‘Do you also count the time it takes to climb back down?’ Rav said.

‘Of course not. But do not overstay your allotted time,’ the steward said. ‘Many want to see the master, and I control drones that will persuade you to leave more quickly than you thought possible.’

Another steward tried to sell to Hari a medal that would absorb the blessing of the hermit’s holy presence.  Rav was delighted by this, and told Hari to buy as many as possible. ‘Think of the armour they’ll make.’

Although there were ladders and ropeways strung up the tree’s broad trunk, it was a hard scramble in Ophir’s deepened gravity.  Hari was slick with sweat and his heart was jackhammering in his chest when he at last reached the crux between two high branches where the hermit sat cross-legged. A slender man dressed in a multicoloured patchwork coat, black hair hanging in ringlets around his thin, calm face.  His eyes were closed and he was chewing leaves, plucking them one after the other from a broken branch he held in one hand, milling them between strong yellow teeth and spitting out the pulp.  He did not open his eyes or in any way acknowledge Hari’s presence while Hari explained how the dead hermit Kinson Ib Kana had saved his life, a debt he hoped to pay by passing Kinson Ib Kana’s book to one of his fellow ascetics.

After Hari had finished speaking, he became aware of the small sounds around him. Wind moving through the drifts of leaves and bright red flowers. The buzz of an erratic traffic of live drones his bios identified as bees, the mingled noise of the city beyond. The hermit spat a dribble of green pulp and plucked another leaf and pushed it into his mouth. At last, a bell rang far below, signalling that Hari’s time was up, and he set the book in a hollow near the hermit’s feet, and climbed down to the deck, the ground.

‘Did you learn anything?’ Rav said.

‘Only that I am a fool,’ Hari said.  ‘But it’s done.’

‘We should have bought medals,’ Rav said. ‘I know I’ll regret it later.’

From Evening's Empires

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Life After Wartime

So because I have a new novel, Evening's Empires, in the Quiet War sequence/universe/future history coming out real-soon-now, I've compiled a new collection of Quiet War stories.  From the introduction:

Two of the stories in this collection, ‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ and ‘Dead Men Walking’ are set in the period of Gardens of the Sun; ‘Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Running, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden’ is set a couple of decades afterwards, at the beginning of a long, slow, peaceful colonisation of the solar system. Most of the fourteen fragments or micro-fictions collected here are set in that golden age: snapshots of ordinary life in a hopeful future. Just one, ‘The Paladin’ hints at the end of that golden age, and a new cycle of turbulence and violence. The last two novels in the Quiet War sequence, In the Mouth of the Whale and Evening’s Empires, are set in the aftermath of the rise and fall of the True Empire, some 1500 years after the Quiet War. These stories are the deep background of their history.

Also includes the first chapter of Evening's Empires. Available on Kindle for the special price of just 77 British new pence, or 1.15 US dollars.

Also available: Stories From The Quiet War.

And by the way, Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione...' was first published in Jonathan Strahan's award-winning anthology Edge of Infinity, packed with great stories about the new solar system. Highly recommended to anyone who likes the Quiet War books.

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Links 06/07/13

'...it seems that the chemistry that can take place in the cold clouds of gas of space is much more complex than we had predicted. Reactions that would be impossible under normal circumstances—simply because there's not enough energy to push them forward—can take place in cold gasses due to quantum mechanical effects. That's because one of the reactants (a hydrogen nucleus) can undergo quantum tunneling between two reactants.'

'Next year, relying on the effects of gravitational lensing, scientists will be able to examine the sun’s closest neighboring star—Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light-years away—and, notably, its solar system, if such a system exists. No planets have been detected thus far; if there are any, they are too small to see with conventional instruments. But when Proxima Centauri passes in front of a distant star in October, 2014, its gravity—and that of any orbiting bodies—will bend the light from that star. By analyzing the way the light bends around Proxima Centauri, scientists will be able to perceive whatever planets are nearby.
'An Italian space scientist, Claudio Maccone, believes that gravitational lensing could be used for something even more extraordinary: searching for radio signals from alien civilizations.'

Giant starfish with lasers, creepy robot babysitters, flying saucer tourism... The strange worlds of Japanese retro-futurism.

Vulcan veteoed: recently discovered 4th and 5th moons of Pluto officially named.

Stephen Van Vuuren has created an IMAX movie, In Saturn's Rings, by animating a million images taken by robot spacecraft. Here's the first teaser trailer:

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The Other Half Of The Sky

One of the depressing things about the science-fiction scene here in the UK at the moment is that the proportion of women writing and publishing SF doesn't seem to have much increased from the fairly low level it was at when I started to buy SF books in the 1970s. The percentage of novels by women submitted to the Clarke Award this year was around 20% (and Farah Mendlesohn, who read many of them, reports that 'most of the books by women are simply not eligible however wide I draw the net'). The average over the past decade wasn't much higher, at around 30%.

Add to this recent incidences of crass sexism in the field, including reports of sexual harassment at conventions, multiple scandals in the Science Fiction Writers of America (here's a useful timeline), and a dumb post about the 'differences' between men and women genre writers on the blog of a publisher which is actually making some effort to publish new women sf writers . . .  There's a growing feeling that science fiction is becoming like one of those antediluvian golf clubs that excludes women so that flush-faced fifty-year-old boys can belly up to the bar and make dubious jokes, complain about political correctness and anyone who doesn't share their skin colour or political opinions, and bang on about imaginary triumphs from days long lost.

I don't want to be a member of that club. Tricia Sullivan points out that it's mostly women who are spending their time and energy pushing back against this stuff - 'I can count on one hand men who have done anything about this' - so for what it's worth, here's my first tiny contribution: an incomplete list of science fiction books by women that I think you should read. You should also check out Ian Sales' ongoing project, Mistressworks, and Nina Allan's excellent cross-genre list. Oh, and take a look at the anthology The Other Half of the Sky, from which I totally stole the title of this post: science-fiction stories about women, not exclusively by women. Meanwhile, the list (shaped by personal taste - let me know what I've missed):

Gill Alderman - The Archivist
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Lauren Beukes - Moxyland
Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow
Octavia E. Butler - Parable Of The Sower
Pat Cadigan - Fools
Suzy McGee Charnas - Walk To The End Of The World
C.J. Cherryh - Downbelow Station
Jennifer Egan - A Visit From The Goon Squad
Eleanor Arnason - A Woman Of The Iron People
Carol Emshwiller - Carmen Dog
M.J. Engh - Arslan (a.k.a. A Wind from Bukhara)
Gertrude Friedberg - The Revolving Boy
Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary
Patricia Geary - Strange Toys
Kathleen Anne Goonan - In Wartime
Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies And Others
Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong
Nalo Hopkinson - Brown Girl In The Ring
Mary Gentle - Golden Witchbreed
Molly Gloss - The Dazzle Of Day
Lisa Goldstein - Tourists
Kij Johnson - At The Mouth Of The River Of Bees: Stories
Gwyneth Jones - Spirit: or The Princess of Bois Dormant
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
M.J. Locke - Up Against It
Leigh Kennedy - The Journal Of Nicholas The American
Nancy Kress - Beggars In Spain
Katherine MacLean - The Missing Man
Maureen F. McHugh - After The Apocalypse
Judith Merril - The Best Of Judith Merril
Judith Moffett - Pennterra
Elizabeth Moon - The Speed Of Dark
C.L. Moore - Clash By Night And Other Stories
Pat Murphy - The City, Not Long After
Linda Nagata - Deception Well
Kit Reed - The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories
Justina Robson - Natural History
Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving Into The Wreck
Pamela Sargent - Cloned Lives
Josephine Saxton - Queen Of The States
Melissa Scott - Trouble And Her Friends
Tricia Sullivan - Lightborn
Sue Thomas - Correspondences
James Tiptree Jr (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Lisa Tuttle - A Spaceship Made Of Stone And Other Stories
Joanna Russ - Picnic On Paradise
Joan Slonczewski - A Door Into Ocean
Joan D. Vinge - The Snow Queen
Kate Wilhelm - Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
Liz Williams - Empire Of Bones
Pamela Zoline - The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories

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Hari's Ship

He studied the ring ship’s familiar contours and landmarks as they grew closer. Spars and tethers anchoring the motor pod in the centre of the ring ship’s Möbius strip. Cubical modules and domes of various sizes scattered over the surface. The two big rectangular hatches of the starboard garages. The cluster of dish antennae where he’d done his first work on the ship’s skin, helping Nabhoj swap out a frozen servo. The workshop blister where he’d assembled much of Dr Gagarian’s experimental apparatus. The hatch for the garage that housed his utility pod, 09 Chaju, a tough little unit with pairs of articulated arms either side of the diamond blister of its canopy.  The hours he’d spent in the couch that took up most of the pod’s cramped cabin, ferrying and assembling components, welding . . .

From Evening's Empires.
 
They are an unfashionable trope in science fiction right now, but at this late stage in my career, when I should probably know better, I'm still writing about spaceships. Despite early consumption of much science fiction steeped in the romance of the Great Out There, I'm not really interested in the sky-filling giants and naval manoeuvres of old-style space opera and default SF. If I'm interested in them at all, if they're something more than a convenient mode of transport to actual landscapes revealed by actual spacecraft, the equivalent of the plane that takes the protagonist of a contemporary novel from London to New York, it's as a place where people work, where they live and make their living.

My father was in the Royal Navy, a sailor from the ship-building town of Belfast. Because my family lived in land-locked Stroud, in the Cotswolds, I didn't see him that often. And after he and my mother divorced I didn't see him at all. But there were always reminders of his work about the house. Postcards and aerograms from ports in post-colonial remnants in the British Empire. Carved giraffes and elephants from Kenya. A gaudy lamp from Hong-Kong, whose shade, decorated with sampans, revolved in the heat of its bulb. A weighty book about the sea and ships: I have forgotten its title, but can still recall its wine-dark cover and grainy photographs. I still have my father's hardback copy of Graf Spee, an account by Michael Powell of the World War 2 battle which he and Emric Pressburger filmed as The Battle of the River Plate; a film in which my father, who served on one of the frigates that stood in for the British WW2 ships, makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance. I remember watching him lay delicate gold leaf on the boat badge for the bridge of the ship on which he was serving. One year, when he was stationed at Portsmouth, my family lived in a rented bungalow in Portchester, hard by the shore, and I would watch the great grey ships across the water, fossick in the low-tide estuarine mud, and bring back shards of electronics from an unfenced military dump.

Hari, Gajananvihari Pilot, the hero of Evening's Empires, was born and brought up in his family's ship. It's the only life he knows until it is taken from him. When his family's ship is hijacked, and his family is kidnapped, or worse, Hari escapes. Stranded on a barren asteroid, he swears to get back everything he's lost.

Where do we get our ideas from?

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A Short Taxonomy Of Spaceship Covers

After a little research, here's a list of credits for the 1970s SF paperback covers I put up in two previous posts. I haven't been able to identify the artist for one cover: Poul Anderson's The Trouble Twisters.  Does anyone know who created it?

Part 1
Equator, by Brian Aldiss - Bruce Pennington
The Trouble Twisters, by Poul Anderson - unknown
The Stars Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov - Chris Foss
The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov - Chris Foss
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov - Chris Foss
In The Ocean of Night, by Gregory Benford - Peter Andrew Jones
The Star Dwellers, by James Blish - Colin Hay
The Testament of Andros, by James Blish - Chris Foss
A Life for the Stars, by James Blish - Chris Foss
Triton, by Samuel R. Delany - Tony Roberts
Now Wait for Next Year, by Philip K Dick - Chris Foss
334, by Thomas M Disch - Tony Roberts

Part 2
All the Sounds of Fear, by Harlan Ellison - Chris Foss
Deathworld 2, by Harry Harrison - Eddie Jones
The Machine in Shaft Ten, by M John Harrison - Chris Foss
The Heaven Makers, by Frank Herbert - Bruce Pennington
The Best of Fritz Leiber - Tony Roberts
After Apollo, by Barry Malzberg - Tony Roberts
The Caltraps of Time, by David I Masson - Gordon C Davis
The View From the Stars, by Walter Miller - Chris Foss
A Hole in Space, by Larry Niven - Tony Roberts
West of the Sun, by Edgar Pangborn - Colin Hay
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe - Jim Burns
Away and Beyond, by A.E.Van Vogt - Chris Foss

A few brief notes:

All the covers were scanned from books in my collection, and I bought almost all of them (the two exceptions are The Machine in Shaft Ten and The Caltraps of Time) in the 1970s. Back then, it seemed as if every other science fiction paperback had a spaceship on its cover; even though the proportion was probably somewhat less, spaceships were a major signifier, and catnip to my younger self.

You may have noticed that none of the covers are of books by women. There were plenty of women publishing science fiction novels and short story collections back then - Octavia E Butler, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ursula Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Anne McCaffery, Vonda McIntyre, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon), and Kate Wilhelm, for instance - but they didn't seem to get spaceships on their covers. They mostly got people instead. No doubt Freud would have something to say about that.

Chris Foss was the major SF cover artist of the 1970s. His massive spaceships and other machines -

- with their chunky realism and chequered and striped paintjobs, are instantly recognisable. I'm pretty sure that he was one of the influences on the generation of British writers who in the 1980s and 1990s started publishing the kind of science fiction that's become known as the New Space Opera. (One of those writers, Al Reynolds, has republished his review of Foss's book, Hardware, on his blog.)

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Spaceships From 1970s British SF Paperbacks, Part 2

(I'll post artists' attributions for this and the previous set a little later. And yes, I know the machine on the cover of The Caltraps of Time might well be a futuristic jet fighter. Exception/rules/whatever.)

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Links 29/06/13

Postcards of the Post Office Tower.

Natural sci-fi movie sets: photographs of the interiors of Icelandic lava tubes.

Patrick Cashin's photographs of transport tunnels under New York City.

The story of Manchester Baby, the world's first stored programme computer:

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Q&A

Background: a few months ago, I did an email Q&A with Jonathan Wright, which was condensed into a short article just published in SFX magazine. The full Q&A is published here with Jonathan’s kind permission.


JW: Your new book "is set in the same far-flung future as his last few novels". Why did you want to tell a more intimate story this time around?

PM: The other Quiet War books have been about people caught up in big historical shifts. I needed several viewpoints because the stories spanned a lot of territory. For this last book I wanted to tell the story of someone whose life has been shaped by history - the history of his family, and the ruins of history - the history of the last three books - that clutter the Solar System. A simple story of someone trying to get back to his home, which someone else has stolen.

JW: "Throughout the novel we follow Hari's viewpoint". Was this a technical challenge as a writer?

Hari was raised aboard a ship, and has only been off it once before. Like any sailor, he's shaped by shipboard life and its customs and hierarchies. And while he's clever and capable and determined, he's also naive. Much like anyone else who leaves home for the first time. So the challenge was to tell the story from his point of view, and with his voice, while at the same time hinting that things aren't always the way he sees them.

JW: You upcoming PS collection: can you tell us a bit about this as well?

PM: Nick Gevers pointed out that my first novel Four Hundred Billion Stars, had been published 25 years ago, and thought it would be nice to bring out a collection of my best SF stories spanning that period. Nick and Peter Crowther, head honcho at PS Publishing, allowed me to make my own selection. It wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be, but I finally winnowed it down to 21 stories, running from one of my first, 'Little Ilya and Spider and Box', published in one of the early issues Interzone back in 1985, to 'The Choice', which won the Sturgeon Award last year. It's interesting - to me, anyway - that the first and last stories and several in between deal with escaping from the confines of home and family. It takes a while to gain the perspective needed to see the shape of your life and your work.

JW: 25 years of novelising, d'ya feel like an old fella? Actually, seriously, how does it feel to get this far? A lot fall by the wayside...

PM: I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and not out of choice. That's what you did. So I guess that, yes, I'm old. How do I feel, to still be writing and publishing? Grateful, I guess. Grateful and amazed to still have a voice, and a place. I still want to write the best book I can, every time. Even if it means writing a very different book than the one before. And I still have a few more books I want to write. And I still think I have things to learn, about writing. So that hasn't changed.

JW:  Is Brit SF healthier now than back then?

PM: Twenty-five years ago the lists of science fiction publishers were dominated by big American names.  And there weren't that many science-fiction books being published. Now, there are more books, by more British authors. But a lot of those books are fantasy, or so-called slipstream. Fantasy has grown; genre science fiction has dwindled somewhat. Which is a pity, and not just because it's what I write. Science grows ever more vigorous, our view of the universe ever more strange and complex. Society is shaped by technological changes. All of this should be stimulating science fiction, but too much of core science fiction - SF published as SF - seems to be talking to itself rather than engaging in dialogue with the world. That dialogue is going on elsewhere it seems.

JW: Your health: how is it? And did your health scare change your attitudes towards things at all?

PM: I've been very ill - I was diagnosed with bowel cancer two and a half years ago. Stage three, advanced, but not yet spread beyond its locus. Not quite terminal, although with only a 40% chance of survival over 5 years. I'm somewhat better now. In the acknowledgements at the end of Evening's Empires, I thank the surgical team and the chemotherapy team who saved my life [see preceding post - PM]. Without them I wouldn't have written Evening's Empires. Without them I wouldn't be around.

Cancer changes you - you can get better, but you can't go back. You're somewhere else. I'm still finding out where that is. Dennis Potter, when he was dying of pancreatic cancer, explained how every moment seemed much more significant, much richer. How the cherry blossom outside his window was the frothiest blossomiest blossom ever. I certainly felt that, at the time, when I didn't know how much time I had left.  I still feel something of it now. Oddly, the book I was writing when I was diagnosed, In The Mouth of the Whale, was in part about the consequences of trying to escape death. The burden of living a very long life. Now I feel even sorrier for poor Sri Hong-Owen now than I did before my diagnosis.

JW: You told me in Wales [at the SFX Weekender in February 2011 - PM] that it was difficult to write when in treatment... That must have been worrying.

PM: There's no such thing as light chemotherapy. You are poisoned to within a precise inch of your life as the doctors attempt to kill stray cancer cells without quite killing you. It was a world of very heavy gravity. I could write. I continued to write throughout the treatment, in fact, but it was . . . just a string of incidents really, without the backbone of narrative.

In my primary school class, there was a kid who could tell fantastic stories - the hero falls down a hole into a cave, is attacked by bats, falls into a stream, is washed over waterfall into another cave, finds treasure, is attacked by a bear, and so on. One thing after another. Great fun at the time, but shapeless. So while I continued to write, and as therapeutic as that might have been, it didn't produce anything with the shape or coherence of a novel.

I knew that I was getting better when I realised that the mass of stuff I'd produced was shapeless, and started over. Just as I was coming out of chemotherapy, I wrote a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', and sold it to Asimov's. It felt incredibly good to be able to do that again. Then I went to Cornwall, and walked the coast route from Zennor to St Ives, on a beautiful sunny day. That also felt incredibly good.

JW: What next?

PM: I've re-edited the three Confluence books - the story of a world-changing hero, set in the very far future in a very strange world. 1200 manuscript pages. They're coming out in a single volume at the end of the year. I'm excited by that.

And I have ideas for two books set in the universe of my Jackaroo stories, in which aliens arrive on Earth to help, give humanity access to junk-littered worlds, and sit back and watch the fun. I'm working on the first of those right now. It's called Something Coming Through.

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Without Whom

I'm not given to appending to the end of my novels the kind of effusive two- or three-page acknowledgements that are increasingly de rigueur, and seem include everyone the author has encountered during the writing process (I'm unfairly exaggerating, but not by much). So although the acknowledgements of Evening's Empires are only three short paragraphs, as far as I'm concerned they're rather longer than usual.

The chief reason is quite simple.  In October 2010 I was diagnosed with bowel cancer.  Although fairly advanced, it was still localised, and treatable by surgery and twelve rounds of chemotherapy.  All of which were free at point of delivery, by the way, thanks to the NHS. For seven months, I became a battleground between my own rebellious cells and the chemical weapons of modern medicine. Luckily, I remain in remission, and although I'm now a permanent resident of what the late, great Christopher Hitchens called Tumortown, I'm more or less recovered, and back at work.

The diagnosis came just after I had submitted the manuscript of In The Mouth of the Whale to my publishers, and I managed to deal with the editing process (including, as is my habit, a final draft) during the early stages of chemotherapy, before the cumulative effects of chemical warfare became too debilitating.  Evening's Empires is the first novel to have been conceived, completed, and published since then.  Hence my gratitude:

I have the great good luck to be able to thank a whole village of people who saved my life: Mr Austin O’Bichere, his surgical team, and the doctors, nurses and staff of the chemotherapy unit of University College Hospital.  My profound gratitude to all of them, and to my partner, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore.  If it hadn’t been for their treatment, care and support I would not have survived to write this novel.

My thanks also to Simon Spanton and Marcus Gipps for editing suggestions, Nick Austin for his thorough and lucid copy-editing, and Simon Kavanagh at the Mic Cheetham Literary Agency for his help, support, and coffee hit points.

I first read about the epic of Pabuji, and the Story of the She-Camels, in William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives.  The poem ‘I shall not coil my tangled hair . . .’ is adapted from a traditional song of the Baul minstrels of Bengal.  ‘On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances’ is a line from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem ‘On The Seashore.’

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Spaceships From 1970s British SF Paperbacks, Part 1

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Links 22/07/13

'On October 24, 2012, Bibi Mamana and her grandchildren were gathering firewood or picking okra outside their home. They may have been in a field. Perhaps it was a militant compound with a weapons depot. 2 missiles were fired, killing Mamana and up to 5 other people, injuring 6 to 8 of the children. Some other men, maybe 3, maybe militants, may have been caught in the blast. A house and a car may or may not have been destroyed. Either 3 cows or 1 buffalo and 2 goats were also killed. The drones remained overhead and 5 to 7 minutes after the first strike more missiles fell.

'This moment—the drones, the missiles, the people, the livestock—is a node in a vast network. It spans the globe, connecting villages to secret installations to office parks to seats of government. It reaches backwards for millenia and will resonate forwards for untold centuries. To trace it out completely is impossible. We are hampered by its size and by the fact that much of it is hidden behind classified protections and some of the rest is barely recorded at all.

'This is an attempt to understand the geography of a drone strike.'

'Mike's morning commute to the battlefield begins with his usual Egg McMuffin and black coffee from a McDonald's drive-through window in Alamogordo, New Mexico. After driving out of town in his Ford pickup, clearing a security checkpoint, and attending a daily briefing, he will be remote-controlling an MQ-9 Reaper drone 10,000 feet above Afghanistan.' Elijah Solomon Hurwitz's photo essay on the mundane lives of drone pilots.

'The United States’ entrance into the First World War in April 1917 marked Americans’ first truly organized attempt at keeping watch on its citizens.'

The graveyard of New York's old telephone booths.

'A sliver of wood coated with tin could make a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery.'  Ideal for your ecoconscious robots.

'3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand.' Ideal for your nanobots.

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In Which I Get Reviewed

The first review of Evening's Empires, by Gary Wolfe, published in Locus Magazine (any typos down to me and my scanning software):

Paul McAuley's Quiet War series (The Quiet War, 2008; Gardens of the Sun, 2009; plus the discontinuous but related In the Mouth of the Whale in 2012, and a bunch of stories) are among the defining works of the notable renascence of solar system fiction in the last decade or so, and McAuley's evident passion for extrapolating the surface and subsurface details of the various gas-giant moons and myriad artificial habitats he calls "gardens" is a good indicator of the appeal of such settings: we have just enough hard astronomical data to understand the challenges for a hard SF writer, but with plenty of room for narrative tooling around. In Benford's playing-with-the-net-up metaphor, we at least have a good idea of where the net is, and writing planetary fiction about worlds that we know something about must seem like a kind of formal constraint, a kind of hard-SF version of sonnets or villanelles. At times, McAuley appeared so enamored with working out these settings that the detailed planetology interrupted his already complex, multiviewpoint narratives, but in Evening's Empires he uses the settings quite effectively as a backdrop for a classic revenge-and-redemption space opera focusing on a single character's quest, and which pointedly pays tribute to a broad swath of SF history. Part of the fun of reading it is name-checking those homages - section titles borrowed from Asimov, Clarke, Godwin, and Silverberg, locations named Trantor and Tannhauser Gate, a scene of man-apes capering before a giant monolith, even a couple of swooping flying-scooter chases worthy of Star Wars set pieces . . .
McAuley is having a good deal of fun laying out what amounts to a tribute to classic space opera, and Evening's Empires, while not lacking in the snazzy mise-en-scene spectacle or the philosophical debates of the earlier novels, is the most purely enjoyable straight adventure tale in the Quiet War series so far.

Extra special bonus from the same issue, Gardner Dozois on my short story collection A Very British History:

I won't even pretend to be impartial about the work of Paul McAuley. I bought and published lots of it when I was editor of Asimov's and reprinted other stories in my Best of the Year series, both before and after my stint at Asimov's. Suffice it to say that I consider McAuley to be one of the two or three best writers working in SF today, and believe some of the stories collected in A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, especially "The Temporary King", "Gene Wars", "Recording Angel", "Second Skin", "17", "Sea Change, With Monsters", "City of the Dead", and "The Choice" to be among the best science fiction stories published by anyone in this period, not just the best of Paul McAuley.

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Dr Gagarian

If you haven't already noticed, hey, I have a new novel, Evening's Empires, coming out in a bit under a month, and I'll be mentioning it here, now and then. Not only because I earn my living writing novels, but also because I'm pretty excited by this one, and want as many people as possible to read it. It's out on July 18, and while it would be a great idea to support your local bookshop, you can already preorder it on Amazon. Both the Kindle edition and the hardback are pretty good deals, but I don't mind if you order the trade paperback. What the heck.

It's not only an end (maybe not the end, but definitely an end, for now), after almost two decades or more, to my exploration of the universe of the Quiet War. It was written in rather special and difficult circumstances, as the acknowledgements at the end makes clear. But I'll talk about that another time. Next week, maybe. Meanwhile, here's a short extract about one of the characters.

Dr Gagarian was a tall skinny tick-tock person some three hundred years old. His jointed carapace of black fibrogen resembled an ambulatory pressure suit or an animated man-sized insect; his major organs had been replaced by machine equivalents; his brain was laced with neural nets that formed a kind of shadow mind that stored his every thought and reaction; his eyes were dull white stones in a leathery inexpressive face. A remote, forbidding figure. Inhuman, barely mammalian. In an age where there was very little philosophical investigation, and most of that was theoretical, he was an incredibly rare beast: an experimental physicist. For the past twenty years, he and his small crew of collaborators had been attempting to identify, measure and define changes in the fine grain of space-time caused by the passing of the Bright Moment. Pabuji’s Gift, whose exploration of remote ruins often took it far from the background noise of human civilisation, was an ideal platform for his latest experiments, and its store of ancient machines and the debris of half a hundred clades and cultures provided useful components for his experiment apparatus.

Nabhomani believed that Dr Gagarian was a charlatan. A magician disguised as a philosopher, consumed by a fantasy of mastering secret powers. Nabhoj and Agrata had little time for Dr Gagarian’s experiments, either. But Aakash was convinced that the tick-tock philosopher and his collaborators were engaged on a hugely important project.

‘We are able to make a living from mining the past because so many of the old technologies have been forgotten,’ he told Hari. ‘Baseliners have given up on philosophy, and posthuman clades prefer theory to application.  We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future. But with our help, Dr Gagarian and his friends will change that. We will be at the root of a great new flowering of practical philosophy. Think of what we will be able to do, once we master the principles that created the Bright Moment! New kinds of communication devices. Unlimited computational capacity within the metrical frame of space-time. New technologies, Hari.  New technologies and new ideas.’

'Will we be rich?’ Hari said.

‘Everyone will be enriched,’ Aakash said. ‘That’s the important thing. Everyone will benefit, and everyone will be enriched.’

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Shaw And Superman

Before you start reading, and if you haven't yet seen the Superman reboot, Man of Steel, SPOILERS AHEAD.

Almost obscured by Man of Steel's very long, loud, and explody slugfest is a dialogue with a play more than a century old. That play, George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, is a verbose, mostly action-free romantic comedy with an examination of Nietzsche's ideas about the Ubermensche and the future evolution of mankind at its centre. Through the mouthpiece of the play's hotheaded hero, and a long dialogue between Don Juan and the Devil, Shaw argued that Supermen, with their superior intellects and ability to circumvent ordinary moral codes, could either become tyrants and dominate the mass of ordinary people, or do their best to elevate everyone. And the best way of elevating the entire human race was to use the same kind of selective breeding used to improve plants and animals. To that end, the institution of marriage should be abolished, so that men and women would be free to choose their ideal mate (oh, and property should be abolished too). The only true race of Supermen would be born from a collective utopia.

In Man of Steel's long prologue, we're shown that the inhabitants of Superman's home planet, Krypton, use cloning and selective breeding to maintain the purity of their race rather than improve it; towards the end of the film, Superman's nemesis, General Zod, forcefully declares that he was specifically bred to defend the ideal of Krypton, and will do anything in his power towards that end. Superman, however, is the first natural birth in millennia, the product of his parents' belief that chance and Shaw's version of free love may cure their society's static decadence.

According to his natural father, Superman's unique birthright may allow him to become a bridge between Kryptonians and humans, and produce something greater than either of them could produce by themselves. And although he's hobbled by his foster-father's warning to hide his unique powers, Superman wanders America, trying his best to do good - shown in flashbacks, these episodes, and those from Superman's childhood as he grows into his powers and absorbs human values, are the best part of the film. Clever, complex, and with some fine imagery, and a nice montage that shows Lois Lane doggedly uncovering the truth. Zod, on the other hand, claims to be above petty human morality; he's willing to commit genocide and found a new version of Krypton on a planet-wide pile of skulls. He's an unfettered exemplar of the popular conception of the Nietzschean Superman, ruthlessly pursuing ideals of racial purity and Lebensraum.

And this is where the film devolves into a grim and joyless empty spectacle; where Superman departs from Shaw's ideal. After the arrival of Zod and his crew, Superman must prove to the US military that he isn't just another enemy alien, and is soon embedded in the military-industrial complex. Zod should be pitiable - he can't help doing what he does because he was born that way - but instead his pulp villainy is cartoonishly one-dimensional, and his apocalyptic threat is an excuse to stage all-out warfare in Superman's home town of Smallville, and in Metropolis. At the end, Superman cops out and commits murder, and may also have committed genocide too. Just as it became necessary to destroy the town to save it, it becomes necessary for Superman to break his moral code to achieve a neat, uplifting ending for the film, and (having swept the mother of all 9/11s under the rug) a shameless reversion to the Golden Age romance.

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