Tuesday, 9 October 2012
Monday, 8 October 2012
Thirty-five years after they were launched, the two Voyager spacecraft are approaching the edge of the Solar System, where the solar wind breaks on the shore of interstellar space; at least one commentator believes that Voyager 1 has already exited the Solar System. It is currently more than 18 trillion kilometres from the Earth, and it takes about 16 hours 47 minutes for its signal, travelling at the speed of light, to intersect Earth's orbit, but that's a mere scratch in terms of interstellar distances. The width of the meniscus on a grain of beach sand compared to the breadth of the Pacific Ocean. The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, 2200 times the distance Voyager 1 has travelled so far; Gliese 667, a triple-star system that possesses the best-known candidate for an Earth-like exoplanet, is 22.1 light years away; the supermassive black hole churning at the Galactic Centre is something like 27,000 light years distant. Voyager 1 isn't aimed at any star in particular, but if it was heading towards Proxima Centauri, it would take almost 17,500 years to reach it. And so on.
Much science fiction gets around the problem of interstellar distances by using wormholes, warp drives and other conveniences that turn stars into the equivalent of stops on a suburban railway line, or speeds at which relativistic time contraction shrinks the subjective length of voyages. But if you stick to the Einsteinian speed limit and plausible velocities, travel across the great voids between stars becomes a serious act, with serious consequences. It becomes, it seems to me, much like death. Starships with cargoes of deep-frozen passengers are pharaonic tombs; those great generation starships, in which descendants of the original crews so often descend into barbarism and forget their purpose and destination, are obvious metaphors for rise and fall of civilisations; the uploaded minds of passengers will be expelled from their pocket heavens at voyage's end, refleshed, reborn. Whether they are lumbering, hollowed-out asteroids or smart basketballs packed with nanotechnology and gene banks inscribed in imperishable quartz glass, starships are the equivalent of funeral barges:
Anyway, one of the characters in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun is obsessed with trying to outwit death. I hinted at the human cost of that obsession in those novels, and wanted to expand and elaborate on that theme, and to play with the image of the starship as a vessel of death and rebirth. Amongst other things, trying to fit the two tropes together led to the writing of In The Mouth Of The Whale, in which the passenger of a starship relives her childhood as she is prepared for rebirth at the end of her long voyage, and finds history has moved on without her. That's the trouble with being dead, even if it's a strategy for long-distance travel: you cede autonomy to the living.
Much science fiction gets around the problem of interstellar distances by using wormholes, warp drives and other conveniences that turn stars into the equivalent of stops on a suburban railway line, or speeds at which relativistic time contraction shrinks the subjective length of voyages. But if you stick to the Einsteinian speed limit and plausible velocities, travel across the great voids between stars becomes a serious act, with serious consequences. It becomes, it seems to me, much like death. Starships with cargoes of deep-frozen passengers are pharaonic tombs; those great generation starships, in which descendants of the original crews so often descend into barbarism and forget their purpose and destination, are obvious metaphors for rise and fall of civilisations; the uploaded minds of passengers will be expelled from their pocket heavens at voyage's end, refleshed, reborn. Whether they are lumbering, hollowed-out asteroids or smart basketballs packed with nanotechnology and gene banks inscribed in imperishable quartz glass, starships are the equivalent of funeral barges:
Now launch the small ship, now as the body diesThere's a great deal of science fiction about death; or rather, there's a lot of science fiction about escaping or avoiding death. About longevity and immortality, uplift and the Singularity and Omega Point gods and all the other Peter-Pan dreams of never dying, or rather - and I think this is the important point - never growing old. There are many teenage heroes in science fiction, and some of them are well into their second century. Maybe it's a Boomer thing, like blue jeans and the Beatles. O, Death. Won't you spare me over 'til another year? And do you take Amex?
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly,
for we cannot steer, and have no port.
T.H.Lawrence, 'The Ship of Death'
Anyway, one of the characters in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun is obsessed with trying to outwit death. I hinted at the human cost of that obsession in those novels, and wanted to expand and elaborate on that theme, and to play with the image of the starship as a vessel of death and rebirth. Amongst other things, trying to fit the two tropes together led to the writing of In The Mouth Of The Whale, in which the passenger of a starship relives her childhood as she is prepared for rebirth at the end of her long voyage, and finds history has moved on without her. That's the trouble with being dead, even if it's a strategy for long-distance travel: you cede autonomy to the living.
Friday, 5 October 2012
So critic Paul Kincaid took on a commission to write a review of this year's crop of best SF&F anthologies, and was dismayed by what he saw. And after his review began to cause a bit of a stir, he amplified his thoughts in an interview, published in two parts. It's all good, useful stuff. Paul Kincaid is sincere, insightful, and very careful about articulating exactly what he means. He's very careful, for instance, to point out that he doesn't think that SF is a dying genre. But he does think that it is exhausted. That it has reached a point of crisis. That it has lost confidence in the future - or in presenting comprehensible futures. Undermined by the feeling that 'the present [is] changing too rapidly for us to keep up with', it has reeled backwards, producing thinly-imagined futures based on unexamined second-hand furniture lifted from older sf. Stories in which most of the sf tropes are mere decoration that if stripped out wouldn't much change the plots, and most of the science is based more on magical thinking than on actual cutting-edge research.
Like every genre, sf has always mined its past, of course, but Kincaid senses something new: a lack of passion. A lack of edge. Of danger.
Way back when, when I was writing Eternal Light, when the whole 'Radical Hard SF' and 'New Space Opera' thing was kicking off, I was part of a bunch of writers who, along with Interzone editor David Pringle, felt something similar. If you were going to reuse the old tropes, we thought back then, you shouldn't take them at face value. You should strip out their guts and rebuild them from the ground up. You should weld in the new biology, the new physics, the new cosmology. Punk it up. I still think that. The internet makes it much easier to keep up with what science is doing now (twenty years ago, I was working in a university, so unlike many of my contemporaries, I had a whole library of scientific literature to draw on; now, much of that stuff is just a few keystrokes away). Ditto cutting-edge fashion, architecture, information technology . . . The future is unfolding all around you, right here in the happening world of the present.
But as Kincaid points out, the present isn't a comfortable place, right now. Which is perhaps why too many sf writers recoil from it, into cosy futures from days past. And there's a professionalism in the genre now that wasn't much in evidence twenty years ago; perhaps people aren't inclined to take risks that might affect their brand. It's certainly harder to publish a different kind of novel, every time, than it once was. And let's face it, twenty years on, it's possible that I've become part of the problem. I'm not sure what my 'brand' is, let alone how to nuture it, but it's possible, yes, that I've grown lazy and complacent. That's why critics like Paul Kincaid are useful - to ask hard questions, to point out uncomfortable truths. That's why we should take them seriously. That's why, if they point out a problem, we shouldn't react defensively, but try to figure out how to solve it. How to do better, next time.
All I know is that I wrote The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun because I was excited by images of the real landscapes of real moons captured by actual robot spacecraft, and wondered what it would be like live out there, and walk across those craters, those wrinkle ridges, and how it would change the people who did. I wrote In The Mouth of the Whale because I wanted to mash the ur-trope of interstellar travel and colonisation with riffs on posthuman transcendentalism into an extended metaphor about death and rebirth. And one of the seeds of Evening's Empires was a reaction to the ongoing denial of science in favour of the kind of magical thinking that has people reject vaccines for homeopathic pills. 'In good times magicians are laughed at,' Fritz Leiber wrote in his short story, 'Poor Superman'. 'They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.'
Which is kind of where we came in.
Like every genre, sf has always mined its past, of course, but Kincaid senses something new: a lack of passion. A lack of edge. Of danger.
Way back when, when I was writing Eternal Light, when the whole 'Radical Hard SF' and 'New Space Opera' thing was kicking off, I was part of a bunch of writers who, along with Interzone editor David Pringle, felt something similar. If you were going to reuse the old tropes, we thought back then, you shouldn't take them at face value. You should strip out their guts and rebuild them from the ground up. You should weld in the new biology, the new physics, the new cosmology. Punk it up. I still think that. The internet makes it much easier to keep up with what science is doing now (twenty years ago, I was working in a university, so unlike many of my contemporaries, I had a whole library of scientific literature to draw on; now, much of that stuff is just a few keystrokes away). Ditto cutting-edge fashion, architecture, information technology . . . The future is unfolding all around you, right here in the happening world of the present.
But as Kincaid points out, the present isn't a comfortable place, right now. Which is perhaps why too many sf writers recoil from it, into cosy futures from days past. And there's a professionalism in the genre now that wasn't much in evidence twenty years ago; perhaps people aren't inclined to take risks that might affect their brand. It's certainly harder to publish a different kind of novel, every time, than it once was. And let's face it, twenty years on, it's possible that I've become part of the problem. I'm not sure what my 'brand' is, let alone how to nuture it, but it's possible, yes, that I've grown lazy and complacent. That's why critics like Paul Kincaid are useful - to ask hard questions, to point out uncomfortable truths. That's why we should take them seriously. That's why, if they point out a problem, we shouldn't react defensively, but try to figure out how to solve it. How to do better, next time.
All I know is that I wrote The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun because I was excited by images of the real landscapes of real moons captured by actual robot spacecraft, and wondered what it would be like live out there, and walk across those craters, those wrinkle ridges, and how it would change the people who did. I wrote In The Mouth of the Whale because I wanted to mash the ur-trope of interstellar travel and colonisation with riffs on posthuman transcendentalism into an extended metaphor about death and rebirth. And one of the seeds of Evening's Empires was a reaction to the ongoing denial of science in favour of the kind of magical thinking that has people reject vaccines for homeopathic pills. 'In good times magicians are laughed at,' Fritz Leiber wrote in his short story, 'Poor Superman'. 'They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.'
Which is kind of where we came in.
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
Two new books. On the left, the mass-market paperback of In The Mouth Of The Whale. Which is not a sequel to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, but shares the same future history, and conflates the childhood of a character from those novels, the gene wizard Sri Hong Owen, with what happens to her when she arrives, after a long and difficult voyage, at the star Fomalhaut. It is published on October 11th.
On the right, the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, which is, most definitely, the sequel to Zombie Apocalypse! In the first novel, a zombie plague spreads after the tomb of an eighteenth century architect, Thomas Moreby, is disturbed; in the second, the human resistance begins to organise itself against the plans of Moreby and his undead army. It's published on October 4th in the UK, and November 1st in the US; the table of contents can be found here.
*Not really. But it would nice if you did.
Thursday, 27 September 2012
Friday, 7 September 2012
Although I'm best known as a science-fiction writer, I'm a long-time fan of horror films and fiction, especially ghost stories (one of the first stories I published, 'Inheritance', is an homage to the M.R. James school of ghost stories). I've written five stories about Mr Carlyle, and the psychogeography of London. Preparing these two stories for republication reminded me all over again of how much fun they are to write, and that so far I've neglected his adventures through Queen Victoria's reign, and most of the Twentieth Century - his role in bringing Cleopatra's Needle to London, the affair of the Zeppelin spy, his involvement with the Secret Intelligence Service and the Special Operations Executive . . . I really should do something about that.
Meanwhile, perhaps you would like to buy the UK or US Kindle editions, or to sample this little story, told by one of Mr Carlyle's old enemies.
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Fans of the late Robert Altman's films - I'm one of them - must contend with the uneveness of his career. He made some truly great films - McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, The Player, Short Cuts - some interesting failures - The Wedding, Popeye - and a few real dogs - Prêt-à-Porter, Beyond Therapy, and Quintet. I've been somewhat obsessed with tracking down the latter: like The Keep, it's a genre film by a major director that has more or less disappeared from view, possibly the least-watched of all of Altman's films. There was a video, but no American or UK DVD release; I finally got hold of it on an Italian DVD. And I really wanted to like it, if only because its freight of bad reviews were catnip to my contrarianism. But, oh dear.
It's Altman's second science-fiction effort. His first, Countdown (1968), is a technothriller about a desperate race to beat the Russians to the Moon that went out of date (or became alternate history) a year after it was released. Quintet (1979), set in a frozen city in a world overcome by a new ice age, is the real far-future post-apocalyptic deal. And while it really isn't a good film - laborious and pretentious, devoid of any real passion or suspense - it is interesting.
Essex (Paul Newman), a seal hunter who's run out of seals to hunt, returns to the city of his birth, where the last human survivors pass what's left of their time play endless tournaments of the eponymous board game while dogs gnaw at disregarded frozen corpses. Essex is accompanied by a young pregnant woman, Vivia (Brigitte Fossey), who is carrying the first human child in a generation, but Quintet isn't in any way as hopeful as Children of Men. Shortly after Essex is reunited with his brother, Vivia and everyone else in the brother's apartment is killed by a bomb, and Essex becomes embroiled in a murderous conspiracy of players who are acting out quintet's killing strategies for real. Although this is almost immediately apparent to the audience, Essex takes a very long time to catch on, clumping glumly through half-ruined rooms and corridors while a fine international cast of visibly chilled actors (Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Vittorio Gassman) spout philosophical cliches about the meaning of life and death.
Mostly filmed in the site of Montreal's 1967 World's Fair, in midwinter, it is authentically frozen, and despite a vaseline effect presumably meant to suggest that the lens is iced up, there are some lovely passages: a tracking shot that follows Essex and Vivia slogging across the white page of the tundra, past a train half-buried in snow drifts; an overhead shot showing Essex launching Vivia's corpse on a river choked with ice floes. The medieval furs and caps of the costumes hint at the genre paintings of Bruegel the Elder; the set-dressing nicely suggests a technologically-advanced future regressing to barbarism (although the whole canine corpse-eating thing is more than a bit overplayed; pretty soon, predicting when the five Rottweillers will next turn up becomes risibly easy). The problem is that nothing much happens, and much of what does happen is either not very interesting; like the game of quintet, whose five-sided gaming tables represent stages in life from birth to death, the slight story is overburdened with symbology and fatalistic nihilism.
If Altman intended to make a pseudo-philosophical mashup of Zardoz and Last Year in Marienbad, then he definitely succeeded. What he failed to do was avoid the principle weakness of weak or bad science fiction: explaining idea and themes in lumpy As-you-know-Bob monologues rather than scattering hints throughout the development of narrative and story. Altman's strength was making the films he wanted to make - films only he could have made - rather than pandering to commercial concerns. But it also led him, on occasion, into making films than almost no one else wanted to watch. If nothing else, Quintet is a useful lesson in the perils of artistic indulgence.
It's Altman's second science-fiction effort. His first, Countdown (1968), is a technothriller about a desperate race to beat the Russians to the Moon that went out of date (or became alternate history) a year after it was released. Quintet (1979), set in a frozen city in a world overcome by a new ice age, is the real far-future post-apocalyptic deal. And while it really isn't a good film - laborious and pretentious, devoid of any real passion or suspense - it is interesting.
Essex (Paul Newman), a seal hunter who's run out of seals to hunt, returns to the city of his birth, where the last human survivors pass what's left of their time play endless tournaments of the eponymous board game while dogs gnaw at disregarded frozen corpses. Essex is accompanied by a young pregnant woman, Vivia (Brigitte Fossey), who is carrying the first human child in a generation, but Quintet isn't in any way as hopeful as Children of Men. Shortly after Essex is reunited with his brother, Vivia and everyone else in the brother's apartment is killed by a bomb, and Essex becomes embroiled in a murderous conspiracy of players who are acting out quintet's killing strategies for real. Although this is almost immediately apparent to the audience, Essex takes a very long time to catch on, clumping glumly through half-ruined rooms and corridors while a fine international cast of visibly chilled actors (Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Vittorio Gassman) spout philosophical cliches about the meaning of life and death.
Mostly filmed in the site of Montreal's 1967 World's Fair, in midwinter, it is authentically frozen, and despite a vaseline effect presumably meant to suggest that the lens is iced up, there are some lovely passages: a tracking shot that follows Essex and Vivia slogging across the white page of the tundra, past a train half-buried in snow drifts; an overhead shot showing Essex launching Vivia's corpse on a river choked with ice floes. The medieval furs and caps of the costumes hint at the genre paintings of Bruegel the Elder; the set-dressing nicely suggests a technologically-advanced future regressing to barbarism (although the whole canine corpse-eating thing is more than a bit overplayed; pretty soon, predicting when the five Rottweillers will next turn up becomes risibly easy). The problem is that nothing much happens, and much of what does happen is either not very interesting; like the game of quintet, whose five-sided gaming tables represent stages in life from birth to death, the slight story is overburdened with symbology and fatalistic nihilism.
If Altman intended to make a pseudo-philosophical mashup of Zardoz and Last Year in Marienbad, then he definitely succeeded. What he failed to do was avoid the principle weakness of weak or bad science fiction: explaining idea and themes in lumpy As-you-know-Bob monologues rather than scattering hints throughout the development of narrative and story. Altman's strength was making the films he wanted to make - films only he could have made - rather than pandering to commercial concerns. But it also led him, on occasion, into making films than almost no one else wanted to watch. If nothing else, Quintet is a useful lesson in the perils of artistic indulgence.
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