Knowledge (in the Biblical Sense)

In researching my talk on The Bible as Science Fiction, I've been looking into Genesis in more detail than I have for quite a while. I'm intrigued by how readily it seems to lend itself to Gnostic interpretation... which is presumably how Christian Gnosticism managed to survive for a millennium or so, before being finally snuffed out in the Albigensian Crusades.

Personally, although I'm interested in Gnosticism as a concept, I'm also very fond of the material world, so have no desire to explain it away as a prison for the soul created by a vengeful and flawed God. Still, I can't help feeling that some of the people who contributed to Genesis may have felt otherwise. Consider...

Genesis contains two separate and mildly incompatible Creation narratives, firstly from I.1 to II.3 and then from II.4 to II.25. These narratives use different names for God -- the plural "Eloi" ["God" in the KJB] and the singular YHWH ["Lord"] respectively. YHWH, who makes Adam and Eve (the Eloi just make a generalised humanity), later becomes the vengeful God of Israel, who's fond of ordering the occasional genocide and striking people down for disobeying Him.

The creations of the Eloi include "every thing that creepeth upon the earth" [I.25], whereas YHWH just creates mammals and birds [II.19]. When a creature comes to tempt Adam and Eve to disobey YHWH's injunction not to eat of the fruit of the tree, the creature is a snake -- "more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made" (emphasis mine). The apparent implication being that YHWH didn't create the Serpent...

YHWH's injunction to Adam and Eve not to eat the tree is ostensibly ordained because "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" [II.17] -- which sounds less like a threat than a statement of cause and effect. The Serpent, on the other hand, points out that "Ye shall not surely die" [III.4], and it's quite right -- they don't. God was, apparently, lying to them.

What YHWH says in III.22 seems to confirm the Serpent's story that he forbade A&E the fruit because knowing good and evil would make them like Gods -- like Him, in fact. After this, it's only their mortality that seems to keep them separate from Him.

(It was a popular idea -- see Paradise Lost, for example -- that Death entered the world as a result of the Fall, but it clearly doesn't. The other tree in Eden would confer eternal life, which is what YHWH doesn't want. This makes it pretty clear that Adam and Eve weren't created immortal.)

All of which makes the Gnostic schema -- where a tyrannical God creates an already-fallen world order which the servants of a higher Godhead must work to redeem -- fit strangely well with the myth. (Not being a biblical literalist, of course, I'm not obliged to worry about all this... and don't you worry either, I won't be talking about any of this at Greenbelt. My talks are unorthodox, but not that unorthodox.)

Complementarily, I've also recently read Revelation all the way through for the first time in years. I know it's a cliché to say so, but I'm truly impressed by how utterly barking it is. (I'm also impressed by the early exhortations to the seven churches, where the angel conveniently tells John to tell them to stop doing the things which he, John, happens not to like them doing.)

The imagery is stream-of-consciousness gibberish (although if you listen to some commentators it's also carefully-coded symbolism disguising a satirical attack on the Roman Empire, which is why on the surface it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever). I find myself put irresistibly in mind of an Eddie Izzard routine:

"...Then I saw a man riding on a lizard, and he had five horns and a big sword coming out of his mouth, and his wife had nine heads and was juggling sausages. Then a beast arose from the ocean, like unto an ox or a wallaby or possibly a bat, and it had the head of a penguin and was made out of soup. And the man and the soup-beast fought, and as they fought it rained for ninety years, and lo! it rained jam..."

Er... so, did Mr Izzard ever actually do a routine like this, or did I make it up?

SF Century

So, here I am finally succumbing to a "meme" -- in the word's corrupted sense of "blog craze". Feel free to comment, imitate etc, according to taste.

"Index of the hundred science fiction books you just have to read", compiled by Phobos

Bold = read
italics = owned and waiting to be read... one of these days
underlined = started but never finished

1. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
2. Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, by Frank Herbert
4. Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
5. Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein
6. Valis, by Philip K. Dick
7. Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
8. Gateway, by Frederick Pohl
9. Space Merchants, by C.M. Kornbluth & Frederick Pohl
10. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart
11. Cuckoo’s Egg, by C.J. Cherryh
12. Star Surgeon, by James White
13. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick
14. Radix, by A.A. Attanasio
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
16. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
17. A Case of Conscience, by James Blish
18. Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon
19. The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham
20. Way Station, by Clifford Simak
21. More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon
22. Gray Lensman, by E. E. “Doc” Smith
23. The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov
24. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
25. Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock
26. Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon
27. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
28. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
29. Heritage of Hastur, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
30. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
31. The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
32. Slan, by A.E. Van Vogt
33. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
34. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
35. In Conquest Born, by C.S. Friedman
36. Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
37. Eon, by Greg Bear
38. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
39. Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne
40. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
41. Cosm, by Gregory Benford
42. The Voyage of the Space Beagle, by A.E. Van Vogt
43. Blood Music, by Greg Bear
44. Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress
45. Omnivore, by Piers Anthony
46. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
47. Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement
48. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip Jose Farmer
49. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
50. The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold
51. Nineteen-Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
52. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
53. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
54. Flesh, by Philip Jose Farmer
55. Cities in Flight, by James Blish
56. Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe
57. Startide Rising, by David Brin
58. Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
59. Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner
60. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
61. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
62. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter Miller
63. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
64. No Blade of Grass, by John Christopher
65. The Postman, by David Brin
66. Dhalgren, by Samuel Delany
67. Berserker, by Fred Saberhagen
68. Flatland, by Edwin Abbot
69. Planiverse, by A.K. Dewdney
70. Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward
71. Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh
72. Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
73. The Puppet Masters, by Robert Heinlein
74. The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
75. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
76. Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison
77. Roadside Picnic, by Boris Strugatsky & Arkady Strugatsky
78. The Snow Queen, by Joan Vinge
79. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
80. Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard
81. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
82. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
83. Upanishads, by Various
84. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
85. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
86. The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin
87. The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham
88. Mutant, by Henry Kuttner
89. Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
90. Ralph 124C41+, by Hugo Gernsback
91. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
92. Timescape, by Gregory Benford
93. The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester
94. War with the Newts, by Karl Kapek
95. Mars, by Ben Bova
96. Brain Wave, by Poul Anderson
97. Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
98. The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton
99. Camp Concentration, by Thomas Disch
100. A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

This tells me that I tend to read the books I buy (eventually), and finish the books I start. I also admit that my experience of women's SF is sadly deficient.

Thanks to Kate for bringing the list to my attention. I have to say I'm far from convinced by some of it, though... some of the books which I have read, I wish I hadn't (I still can't see the point of Jules Verne), and many of those I haven't I have no desire to (I mean, Ralph 124C41+? The Postman?). And what's Alice in Wonderland doing there, or the Upanishads? Why no Brian Aldiss, or Iain Banks?

I may try to compile my own list -- although, given how much I haven't read, that too is going to be highly limited and subjective. At least I know I'll score higher, though.

[Edited 21 October 2004, to reflect the fact that I've since read the two Bester novels. I'll carry on updating this entry indefinitely, probably.]

Blockage => Bloggage

Having given up on the talks in a bit of a panic for the time being, I'm now working on the September-deadlined short story.

Since Friday I've:

1. realised that my plot was in completely the wrong order and rejigged it,
2. found a much better title than the previous one -- still a Shakespeare quote, but a more apt one with some pleasing '50s B-movie resonances into the bargain,
3. realised that the first paragraph was very nearly in iambic pentameter -- and hey, it's a Shakespearian story -- so reworked it so that it actually is, and
4. actually written bugger all.

This is more or less par for the course. Sooner or later my creative plughole will spontaneously unblock itself, and the whole thing will come splurging out. (I can think of other metaphors there, none of them edifying.)

Meanwhile, I may as well update the blog.

Dunst Able

Further to my comments about the lovely Kirsten Dunst: I re-watched Interview with the Vampire the other night, for the first time since about 1995. The film is, for the most part, insufferably humourless, with Messrs Pitt and Cruise lounging around lounging around looking terribly decorative and fin-de-siècle, and a pretentious vampirism-as-AIDS metaphor which was done rather better in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula [*].

However, the young Ms Dunst's performance is absolute genius. She plays the vampire child Claudia, who is "turned" when young and who will therefore never grow older; and she does it with a passion and a tragedy which are simply astonishing. How an eleven-year-old girl (which appears to have been her age at the time, although she's made up to look a good deal younger) could so effectively convey the pain of a forty-year old imprisoned in a pre-pubertal body I can't imagine, but Dunst is utter dynamite in the role.

It's kind of unfortunate, really, that the Spider-Man films use such an impressive talent mostly as decoration... although to be fair the entire point of Mary Jane's character is her reassuring ordinariness, so there's not an awful lot for any actor to work with there.

Incidentally, both Dunst and Winona Ryder (who played the semi-vampirised Mina in Bram Stoker's aforementioned Dracula) appeared as two of the sisters in Little Women. Did any of the other sisters in that film play vampires? (Has Clare Danes, for instance?) Inquiring minds want to know.


[*] Speaking of taking Stoker's name in vain, I was amused by the legend identifying the author of this recent Buffy novel.

The Devil's Microbrew

We commemorated Silk's visit to Bristol on Saturday by taking him (and sundry mad scientists who were attending his gas kinetics conference) to the Smiles Brewery Tap, one of our favourite Bristol pubs.

The evening took a turn for the distinctly weird when we decided to try out the new microbrewery-cum-restaurant, Zerodegrees. Being long-term habitués of brew-pubs like Smiles', we weren't prepared for the achingly trendy, glass-walled, pine-floored and utterly packed establishment we found. The 500-odd people there can't possibly have been real-ale drinkers (the only beard, beer-gut and black T-shirt we could see in the place were located, I'm embarrassed to say, about my own person), so what exactly did they think they were doing?

I'm not totally sure what I think about this. As a CAMRA member, I am of course supposed to applaud any attempt to popularise decent beer, and all this stuff was brewed on the premises. I was particularly seduced by the black lager, an utterly surreal porter/pilsner hybrid I'd never even imagined, let alone seen elsewhere. [Edit to add: It seems this may have been a schwartzbier, a traditional German style which I'd just never come across before.] This sort of good-but-gimmicky approach was reflected in the other beers as well -- including a seasonal mango beer (which doesn't seem to be listed on the website).

They also did pizzas, which looked as if they might be rather good.

On the other hand, Zerodegrees appears to be a chain, with another branch in Blackheath and more planned -- all brewing locally, but to centrally-determined recipes. And certainly a CAMRA purist would look censoriously at a brewery whose repertoire was built around these deliberately wacky beers.

I admit I'm likely to go back there (perhaps not again on a Saturday night, unless we manage to achieve protective coloration by dragging along some of our fashion-victim friends -- and yes, we do have some) but I think I'll feel distinctly Faustian in doing so.

Reading for Comprehension

TESCO
MY BABY'S POWDER
I'll leave skin soft and smooth
I'll help keen skin dry
I'm hypoallergenic
[PTO]

TESCO MY BABY'S POWDER
I'll leave baby's delicate skin feeling soft and smooth. Use me after each bath or nappy change to help keep baby's skin dry. I'll form a comfortable layer to help prevent friction and avoid skin irritations.
I'm ideal for use by all the family.
[Directions for Use, Warning, Ingredients etc]

Never mind for the moment why I have this in the house -- who is the speaker in this passage? Does the powder have a baby it's referring to as "my"? Is the parent of the baby hypoallergenic? What?

(Hmm? No, I'm not getting much work done today, as it happens. Why do you ask?)

Talking Drivel

You know you've been spending too much time alone in the house with the cats when human faces start looking surprisingly bald, and lacking in triangular ears.

Anyway. It seems that writing talks is surprisingly difficult -- particularly talks to a lay audience about your academic research. Who would have imagined?

I read my first attempt to B. last night, and after ten minutes she pointed out the following:

1. It isn't a lecture.
2. The audience aren't going to be examining me.
3. They won't have been supplied beforehand with a comprehensive bibliography from which to arm themselves with counterarguments against which I need to defend myself pre-emptively.
4. They're likely to respond better to someone talking to them in a friendly, informal manner than to someone who constructs a full and watertight argument with plenty of citations and supporting evidence.

...all of which would seem, rather irritatingly, to be true, and means I've wasted a week's work.

For God's sake, Why does nobody ever TELL me these COMPLETELY OBVIOUS, COMMON-SENSE FACTS?

X-Position

For the past year or so, I've been re-watching all nine seasons of The X-Files, in order from the beginning through to the end. Altogether, this comes to 201 TV episodes and a film, roughly 146 hours of television.

I obviously can't do this much material critical justice in a blog entry, but there are a couple of comments I feel the need to share.

Gillian Anderson is at better actor than David Duchovny, by at least an order of magnitude. She's also a surprisingly gifted director (see the episode all things), although a less-than-fantastic scriptwriter. Duchovny is insufferably twee in both these capacities.

William B Davies (Cancer Man) appears to have structured his episode as a writer-director, En Ami, entirely around close-ups of Scully's cleavage, which I can't really argue with.

The series actually improves enormously in the final three seasons, as characters start developing and being affected by their experiences (something that hasn't happened... well, before, really). New characters arrive, the whole thing becomes an ensemble drama rather than a two-handed anthology series, and it all picks up splendidly just in time for the cancellation.

This does follow a disastrous nadir around the middle of Season 5 -- which is where I got up and left the first time around. Campy self-aware humour worked well in the first three seasons, where it formed a welcome contrast to the po-faced (but in its own way wonderful) horror-mystery material surrounding it -- but this was precisely because it cropped up only in very occasional episodes. Seasons 5 and 6 are almost exclusively camp, twee drivel, with the occasional redeeming gem like William Gibson's fantastic Kill Switch.

Unfortunately, things do get a bit cramped towards the end of Season 9, as the creative team attempts to provide closure for many of the ongoing plotlines, and succeeds only in failing to satisfy with respect to any of them.

SPOILERS now for the final two-parter, The Truth:

Despite everything I'd been promised, the end of the series resolves pretty much bugger all, and doesn't even reveal much that you couldn't have picked up from the earlier arc episodes if you'd been paying attention. The final scene, with Mulder and Scully contemplating the coming alien invasion and trusting to God to help them avert it, is rather sweet, but the rest of the thing is pretty much a waste of time.

Particularly when it reveals -- oh so very surprisingly -- that the series' arch-villain isn't in fact dead, but has survived his terminal cancer and precipitate wheelchair journey down a flight of stairs, as inexplicably as he previously survived being shot in the head and losing all his blood. It obviously runs in the family, as Mulder also frequently comes back from the dead -- in one case after burial and considerable decomposition -- and Cancer Man's other son, Spender, makes a similarly impressive comeback from being shot in the head and set fire to.

In The Truth, a helicopter fires an air-to-surface missile directly at Cancer Man's knees, and we are graphically shown its impact and the subsequent comprehensive detonation of his flesh and skeleton. Fifty quid says they bring him back for the second film, if there ever is one.

Getting Unnecessarily Sentimental

I spent the weekend at the wedding of an old friend, back in my teenage home town of Worthing (or, if you've read Of the City of the Saved..., Kempes District). At some point I may try and analyse the love-hate relationship I have with the place, but I suspect it may end up being entirely banal and precisely what you'd get from anyone who'd long since moved from a provincial town to a reasonably major city.

The important thing about this weekend was the wedding, and its guests. The wedding itself was lovely, a short and simple ceremony followed by a decent reception. Veggie food was sparse, but we managed to persuade the catering staff to bring us the leftovers from other tables and we ended up doing rather well. The speeches were numerous, but crucially short (the sweepstake winner had plumped for 33 minutes), and the perennial post-reception disco was splendid.

Among those in attendance -- the bride included -- were about three-quarters of the group I bonded with as a teenager, who have remained my closest friends in the time since, including eight years at university (during which I made a whole lot of very excellent new friends), my marriage to B. and our move to Bristol. Most of these guys I hardly ever see these days, but I've known them half my life -- longer in some cases -- and I love them (including the couple of privileged adoptees the group has acquired over the years) more than anyone else on Earth except for B.

(Oh, and my family I suppose. Hi, Dad.)

It's when I'm with these friends that I'm always inspired to write -- a few books late, admittedly -- that Great Autobiographical First Novel with which a marvellous new talent always explodes onto the literary scene, to be greeted with critical acclaim, fame and surprisingly adequate amounts of money.

It would be an epic tale of childhood friendship in the face of adult life, of bonds between people who were once strangers becoming strong enough to persist in the face of everything the world can throw at them. It would be a saga of innocence and experience, of huge parties and remarkable feats of drunkenness, of Wham, Queen, Abba and Enya, of utterly disastrous holidays, of flirtation, sexual awakening and teenage heartbreak, of mature relationships and messy endings, of courtships and separations, of marriage and divorce, of fidelity and lust, of pregnancy, birth and parenthood, of moving apart and staying together, of disability, accident and bereavement, of art and science, of finance and third-world aid, of conversion and loss of faith, of christianity and humanism, of fundamentalism, liberalism and apathy, of angst and comfort, of misery and elation, of mistrust and loyalty, of astounding naiveté and hard-won cynicism, of optimism and disappointment, of triumph and loss, and of abiding love. It would be a vast, bible-thick tome which would contain enough material for a dozen TV miniseries and, basically, set me up for life.

Unfortunately it would also be The One Where None Of Phil's Friends Ever Speak To Him Again, so it'll probably never happen. Still, it sounds pretty good on paper, doesn't it?

Marshall My Thoughts

Finally getting round to replying to Steven K's comments on Michael Marshall [Smith]'s The Lonely Dead -- SPOILERS for which, and for its prequel[*] The Straw Men, will shortly follow.

I actually finished the book a week or so ago, but have, as advertised, been busy.

I do agree that The Lonely Dead was ultimately unsatisfying, and that it fails to live up to the promise of The Straw Men. This is partly because the big revelation towards the end appears relevant only on a local scale, and (despite some vaguely mystical hints) is unlikely to affect the characters in the same way.  Which when compared with "Human society has always been run from behind the scenes by a secret cabal of serial killers", is bound to come as something of a disappointment.

I actually quite like the grounding of the fantastic in reality in both these novels -- to start off small-scale and ordinary and then build up to that revelation in TSM was a pretty bold move, and one that I did feel worked for me. Given the usual expectations of a crime thriller, it's an interesting experiment with generic slipstreaming -- TSM can just about be accommodated within the crime genre, but TLD's frankly SF revelation definitely slips the moorings, like an X-Files episode smuggled into a series of an ordinary cop show.

I think another part of the problem is that, after the discoveries they make in TSM, the characters in TLD are less grounded in reality. Instead they're grounded in a paranoid fantasy based loosely on reality, and the sideways slip into a world where Neanderthals live on and are responsible for all of humanity's "hidden people" legends (just as the Straw Men themselves are responsible for all the conspiracy theories) is less shocking and effective than it would have been if it had come in the first novel, or in a non-series novel with new characters.

That said, there's a lot that's effective in TLD -- quite apart from the prose, which is to die for. The meditations on addiction, whether that comes in the form of cigarettes or serial murder, were very chilling indeed. The tracing of the serial-killing impulse to ancient sacrificial ritual was also very fine, and put me closely in mind of Neil Gaiman's excellent American Gods, another novel by a British US resident about how ancient elements of European culture infuse that of the modern-day United States. And the returning characters from TSM, apart from Zandt who's hardly in it, were still as compelling.

As, say, the second book in a trilogy (and I'd hope that would be what it turns out to be, rather than an open-ended series) I think it's very good. Hopefully it forms a brief diversion from the main action, and a prelude to the character development and (again, hopefully) genuinely shocking revelations of the third volume. Perhaps that's the only context in which it can really be judged -- as an individual novel, it suffers from its evident series status.

Generally, though, it's pretty damn good, but -- because of its position in the series -- precisely how good depends on where the story's going next.

[*] OK, so strictly speaking "prequel" was coined to refer to a story which is written and published later than a story which came out before, but which is set earlier -- effectively, a book- (or whatever) length flashback. Thus Prelude to Foundation, The Phantom Menace, The Merry Wives of Windsor etc. So... what is the word which just means "story to which the story currently under discussion is a sequel"?

Writing updates / Blatant plug

Apologies for the silence from Peculiar Lives recently -- I've been sticking my face into my screen and writing instead of updating things here.

The novella's now one-third complete, at least in current draft. That's 11,000-odd words, which isn't actually all that much, but as I've indicated it's rather slow going. I'm enjoying the persona of my novelist-narrator, and I'm enjoying the story he tells, but recreating his style is a laborious process. Apart from anything else, a novelist (a good one, at least) doesn't have a single style: they vary how they write from novel to novel, and from scene to scene, depending on the demands of the story. Trying to mimic that, but remain in character, is tricky. Particularly when the novelist I'm imitating is frankly a better writer than I am. Hey ho.

Anyway, now I've reached my short-term target the novella goes on the back burner for the rest of the summer while I work on the short story and the two talks. The former I'll be telling you all about when the official announcement is made -- when that happens is out of my hands, though, and it could even be sometime next year. (Anthologies seem to require lengthy lead-in times, or perhaps I'm just used to the quick and efficient turnover at Mad Norwegian.) It's another piece which involves research, though. For a start there are pre-existing characters who need to be be written in a manner consistent with their previous appearances (which I'm fairly used to by now, of course, and one of them at least is a character I love). On top of that, the idea I've decided on involves a period setting, with much made of the science of the period, plus even more literary pastiche.

I do sometimes wish that I'd be a little less ambitious at the planning stages. I come up with gloriously complicated ideas which carry me away entirely with their potential -- and then I find myself having to actually live up to that potential in the writing. Hey ho.

So, these talks. They're happening at "Between the Lines", the literary venue at the Greenbelt Arts Festival, which is held at Cheltenham Racecourse on 27-30 August, the Bank Holiday weekend. My talks are on Science Fiction as the Bible (Sunday 29 August at 5pm) and The Bible as Science Fiction (Monday 30 august at 12noon).

As Christian festivals go, Greenbelt is way up the liberal end (frankly, I couldn't stand it any other way), and well worth attending for the bands, drama and visual arts, some of which are of very high quality indeed. Even so, I'm a little nervous about some of the more heterodox things I'm planning to say. For the most part (and when they actually get written) the talks are going to be a distilled and chatty version of my thesis, which looked at how SF writers of all religious persuasions (including some very wacky ones, yes I'm looking at you Mr Dick) use Christian imagery drawn from Paradise Lost via Frankenstein in their work. However, at the end I will be drifting into interpretations of some books of the Bible according to SF paradigms, which may raise a few eyebrows and/or hackles. So, any moral support anyone felt like lending would be good.

In addition to the talks, I'll be reading from Of the City of the Saved... at the open-mike Writer's Cafe organised in the same venue by the Subway writers' collective, on the Sunday evening from 8pm. Day tickets are available at £25 for adults, £16 concessions. If you turn up, come and say "Hi".

If We Shadows Have Offended...

I'm thinking of wrapping up the experiment that has been Petunias Thrive, on the grounds that I don't have time to update it nearly as often as I wanted to, and that (perhaps as a consequence of not having time to think about it every day) the dreams I'm recording there don't seem to be all that interesting anyway. If there's a public outcry, I'll keep it open, but as things stand I'm not sure it's serving any particularly worthwhile purpose.

Bits and Pieces

Bit: The reviews page for Of the City of the Saved... at Outpost Gallifrey has been updated with a review by Finn Clark. Finn's a prolific reviewer and a good one, who doesn't hesitate to let negative views be known if he has them. And, despite having had his reservations about the whole City concept from The Book of the War, he gives OtCotS... a qualified thumbs-up. Which comes as something of a relief.

Piece: As you'll see, I've finally worked out how to add a list of links to my sidebar, once again by cribbing off Mags Halliday's blog (eventually she's going to get fed up with me doing this). So far various blogs of interesting people are listed, along with my pages and some other relevant stuff. I'll be adding new links as I refer to them here, or just as I happen to stumble across them.

Novella Update

Work has now begun in earnest on my novella project (deadline end of January 2005), although it's going to have to share vacation time with a long and convoluted short story for a different publisher (deadline end of September) and two talks on science fiction and the Bible for the Greenbelt arts festival (respective deadlines Sunday 22 and Monday 23 of August at the very, very latest).
 
Apart from all the usual -- writer's block, inability to settle, a tendency to get distracted by arsing around on the internet and writing weblog entries -- I'm finding it surprisingly difficult.  Its projected length is barely a third that of Of the City of the Saved..., but it's in many ways a more sustained piece.  The narrator is a novelist, closely based on a real-life author I studied for my thesis (but not Philip K. Dick this time), and I'm making an effort to imitate closely his rather sententious period style.  It isn't easy.  Each chapter of OtCotS... had a different voice from the preceding one -- none have "narrators" as such (well, one strand has, but only the one), but the eighteen viewpoint characters' voices inflect the third-person narration seen through their eyes.
 
Admittedly I sometimes darted ahead along a single character's "thread", writing several sequential chapters in the same voice, but a) I always had alternatives if one voice was getting tricky, and b) even the most prominent such threads only amounted to some 18,000 or so words.  The novella is to be 35,000 to 40,000 in the same style, and that tone is one that isn't coming all that naturally to me.
 
So... it's all a little tricky.  That said, I've managed to revise the sample chapter, play around with the themes so that they make a little more sense, and complete a second chapter before starting on the third.  That's taken me a week, and there are nine chapters and an epilogue to go. 
 
At some point I'll talk about pastiche, parody and homage, and what distinguishes a metatextual appraisal in fiction of an author's work by a trained scholar, from a shameless rip-off by an unimaginative hack.  Er, possibly.

Culture

Recently watched:
Spider-Man 2, which is great -- I love the romance and the simple heroism it promotes. The morality is no more complex than in the original Star Wars trilogy, although slightly more interesting: Peter Parker's great temptation is not to evil, but to neutrality. The movie makes its moral points in bold strokes -- to do the right thing you must make sacrifices, good people can be corrupted yet remain at heart good people, "With great power comes great responsibility" -- but it does so with such good-natured and childlike earnestness that you can't but love it. Plus it has some great self-aware lines ("Guy called Otto Octavius ends up with eight arms! What are the odds?"), and Kirsten Dunst is lovely.

Recently finished reading:
What Does a Martian Look Like? by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (the authors who brought you The Science of Discworld, The Science of Discworld II and, apparently, an original sf novel called Wheelers). It's an entertaining book, and I have a lot I'd like to say about it. At some point I may even do so, here or on the book reviews section I keep meaning to add to my website. Suffice it to say that, while I'm fully convinced that Cohen and Stewart know what they're talking about when it comes to science -- and they can write it clearly and compellingly -- their attempts at cultural analysis, and evaluation of extant works of science fiction in particular, frankly suck.

Their eagerness to promote "correct" science in SF, and deride (as "lazy", "wrong" and at one point even "discourteous") SF which doesn't consider this to be a priority, leads them at times onto distinctly unsteady ground -- which they then stomp around on, throwing their weight about like Godzilla. (Speaking of which, surely you realise that bipedal dinosaurs were nowhere near that big? Godzilla would be far too heavy for its bones to support its weight -- thus rendering the spectacle of a gigantic dinosaur pounding New York or Tokyo into rubble entirely unbelievable.)

Currently reading:
The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall. I've been a huge fan of this author since he was known as Michael Marshall Smith and wrote SF novels (or -- as some of his less charitable readers aver -- the same SF novel on three separate occasions). The Lonely Dead is a sequel to his earlier horror-thriller The Straw Men, and on first opening it I found myself slightly disconcerted. The first chapter was, somehow, nowhere nearly as involving as his other work. Distressingly, I thought that something must have gone wrong -- and I confess, shamefully jealous non-genius writer that I am, that I felt a moment's schadenfreude at the prospect.

Marshall was just easing us in gently. After the second chapter I was utterly sucked in, and have been having trouble since letting go of the book even when I'm supposed to be asleep, eating or working. Marshall has a deceptively conversational style which keeps sucker-punching you with unexpected jokes and subtle metaphors, even when he's writing about faceless conspiracies of serial killers. It's fantastic stuff -- unfortunately, both for my writerly self-regard and for my various ongoing projects.

Londitude

B. and I spent the weekend in London, care of the father-in-law's sixtieth birthday celebration and an entirely separate party thrown by a couple of Oxford-derived friends.

It was a bit of a surreal day altogether, starting off (after we'd driven to Richmond and collected B.'s frail granny) at the RAF Club on Picadilly for lunch, proceeding to the London Eye, then via tea and scones at a hotel and champagne at the Criterion wine bar to the 100 Club, before ending up at a goth-infested house in Bermondsey. (We'd ditched B.'s granny by that point, obviously.) Particularly nice seeing many people we hadn't seen for ages, at both the parties.

Very pleasant day however, if rather packed and tiring. I rediscovered that I like London a lot when I've had enough coffee. When I haven't, it's bewildering and difficult and makes me whimper. It's a good thing I don't live there, or I'd be constantly resorting to chemical stimulants (something I'm quite sure isn't true of most of the rest of the population).

Today has been my last day of term, and I'm knackered. Tomorrow I will be mostly prostrating myself before getting down to writing in a big way, for the rest of the holiday. More bloggery to follow in the next couple of days, I shouldn't wonder.

Making a Spectacle, Etc.

You may remember my fashionable glasses. Well, while I was cleaning them yesterday the fuckers came apart in my hands. The whole left arm broke off at the welded join.

The opticians were very good about it, immediately offering to order in a replacement frame... but even so, I now have to spend at least a week relying on spectacles which don't correct for my astigmatism. And surely -- I mean, correct me if I'm wrong -- but surely trendy, popular glasses which people are invited to pay a lot of money for, ought at least to have the quality of not falling apart to recommend them? I mean, shouldn't they? Or am I being very naive?

I just hope this happens to bloody David Beckham, too.

Monstrous Progeny

I saw Van Helsing Thursday night. Great, if startlingly mindless, fun. The whole look of the thing was very impressive, most of the acting was adequate (although Richard Roxburgh's Dracula was lacklustre -- a bit of a flaw when he was the main villain), and the use of the Universal horror movie icons was very inventive. The Brides of Dracula, with their floaty chiffon dresses morphing into bat's wings, and the electrically-sparking, occasionally-falling-apart Frankenstein monster, were particularly enjoyable.

On the other hand, the ending was messy, some of the computer-animated characters were unconvincing, and they killed off Victor Frankenstein in the first scene. What's more the script could really have done with a lot of polishing. Given that the movie was almost constant action, the last point is perhaps arguable, but I'd have liked to have seen some more intelligence applied, especially given the deliberate harking-back in some particulars to the original novels from which the monsters originally came. This was particularly noticeable in the case of Frankenstein's creature, who (although bolt-necked and shambling) at least talked reasonably like the character from Mary Shelley's novel, with a high degree of articulacy and as much Romantic sensibility as can feasibly be fitted into a two-hour film with lots of fighting in it.

Predictably, I was most interested in this whole postmodern-metatextuality angle. Multiple crossovers across the fiction of particular periods have been a growth area recently, with Alan Moore's excellent graphic novels based around The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen picking up where previous efforts -- Kim Newman's Anno Dracula novels, for instance -- have left off. (Both of those series also include Dracula in their paracanon, although he's not named in LoEG.)

Van Helsing riffs heavily on the classic Universal horror flicks, throwing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, his Creature and Igor, Dracula and his Brides, and the Wolf Man into the same plot, just to see what happens. (Nor does the metatextuality stop there -- the early scene in the Vatican, for instance, riffs very obviously on the James Bond films, while Mr Hyde is directly related to the hunchback of Notre-Dame.) Compared with LoEG or Anno Dracula, that's not particularly impressive (just one scene in Newman's Dracula Cha Cha Cha, set in the 1950s, shows Tom Ripley chatting with Clark Kent, Tony Hancock, Gomez and Morticia Addams and characters from sundry horror films) but the logic of the interaction between the various stories and their motifs is well thought-through.

The way such stories seem to work seems to be to take two linear stories (or clusters of parallel stories, I suppose, in the case of the Dracula and Frankenstein mythoi) and use them as mathematical axes, creating a whole new fictional space (in Van Helsing's case, a four-dimensional one) which the new metafiction can explore. These new degrees of liberty are perhaps why the plots of such stories have a tendency to sprawl out of control, but they also allow some astonishing imaginative constructs to be assembled.

Surely a sequel has to be on the cards -- Van Helsing Meets the Mummy being the obvious one, although it wouldn't surprise me to see the Invisible Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon thrown into the mix too. Personally I'd prefer to see them bring back the Bride of Frankenstein, but that would be a little tricky now they've killed off the good Doctor.

And how long can it be, in these days of computer-generated footage, before Abbott and Costello Meet Van Helsing?

Minor Update

Feeling a lot better today -- the foot's fine, given enough anti-inflammatory painkiller type drugs. Another few days and I'll be back to normal.

Amazon.co.uk have finally started listing Of the City of the Saved... as available. What's more, they're selling it at 10% off and offering an attractive "buy together" deal with This Town Will Never Let Us Go.

The book also has its first online review at Outpost Gallifrey. Damian Jeremiah's spelling may be a little wobbly, but he's very enthusiastic. Which is nice.

A number of other people have posted opinions, including at least one full length review, to the OtCotS... thread at the Faction Paradox forum. Feel free to read and contribute, if you like. Any discussion forum benefits from fresh blood -- a Faction Paradox forum, perhaps even more so.

Oops

I had an unexpectedly intimate encounter with the road, on the way home from work yesterday in the pissing rain. I had to brake suddenly, the scooter's tyres weren't as firm as one would ideally wish, and suddenly the world came up and met me sideways. Bloody ouch.

I seem to be OK, though -- my knees are grazed (but not too badly), and the toes of my left foot are evidently a bit sprained. I spent this morning waiting around to have them x-rayed, so as to make sure nothing was broken... but this seems to be the case, so hurrah.

Given how it felt last night I'm rather surprised, actually, but today (admittedly with liberal application of painkillers) it's not too bad to walk on. I may even go back into work tomorrow. Just not on the bloody bike, which is now in for repairs. Hey ho.

A Change of Mind

I'm thinking it's time to change my reading habits. For quite a while now, I've been reading one book at a time, and usually racing to finish it because there are so many other books I want to read, and there's only a limited number it's possible to read in a lifetime, for God's sake.

In fact, The Big Issue always used to give this figure as 3000, which terrified me. There are so many more good books than that... I mean, I own more books than that. Assuming an average reading lifetime of 60 years, this works out roughly a book a week, and I start to panic if I don't manage this. Fortunately I got a considerable headstart when I was a student, as I didn't have a great deal to take up my time other than reading books. At present, however, trying to juggle a job with a writing career, it's a struggle to make that figure.

I think it's time for a change of approach, though. I'm doing the books I read a disservice in rushing through them so fast, and that there's no intrinsic reason, except for this Big Rush, why I shouldn't read two or more at a time. A lot of people work this way: indeed, I used to do the same myself when I had more reading time available. I just need to retain the details of several books in my head over a reasonable period of time, and how hard can that be?

So, then. I'm Now Reading Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley, a well-known British sf writer with a bit of a mystical bent but a strong grasp of science -- rather like a latter-day Arthur C. Clarke, although he can write rather better than Clarke did for the majority of his oeuvre. Red Dust is set in a Chinese-dominated civilisation on a terraformed Mars some 500 years hence, and is marvellous at depicting a planetary civilisation with a realistic cultural and historical texture. (So far it's better than Amazon's reviewer says it is, anyway.)

I'm also reading The Clockwork Woman by Claire Bott, an excellent fable of early feminism and the world in which it operated. The story, which has strong echoes of both Mary Wollestonecraft and Mary Shelley, demonstrates "womanhood" as a cultural construct by making the narrator a literally artificial woman. It's part of Telos's Time Hunter series, and is a sophisticated read.

In between times, I'm reading the latest issue of Fortean Times, which has a splendid article on early attempts at cyborgisation. Apparently in the nineteeth century snails were thought to be telepathic, communicating through an exchange of "escargotic fluid" in the aether. Fantastic.

When I finish The Clockwork Woman, I intend to start What Does a Martian Look Like?.

We Want Information

B. and I were discussing the ITC television series The Prisoner the other day, and I happened to mention the connection with Patrick McGoohan's previous spy series, Danger Man.

"So is the Prisoner meant to be the same person as Danger Man?" she asked me.

"Well," I said.

I explained to her that the writers of the Prisoner tie-in novels published in the early seventies had certainly referred to Number Six as "Drake", but that it was doubtful whether they had the authority to declare canonically that the two characters were identical. I mentioned Leo McKern's often-misheard line in the episode Once Upon a Time, where he tells Number Six (temporarily regressed to schoolboyhood) "See me in my study during the morning break" -- and not, as some have firmly maintained, "during the morning, Drake". I mused that Number Six's anonymity seems to be so intrinsic to the character of The Prisoner that identifying him as a specific person would be damaging to the text as a whole, adding that the name of McGoohan's production company, "Everyman Films Ltd" seemed to bear this out. Judiciously, however, I added that the makers of The Prisoner didn't actually own the rights to the characters from Danger Man anyway, so it might be that they were pursuing a "neither confirm nor deny" policy, so as to keep Danger Man fans interested while avoiding legal entanglements. On balance, I concluded, Number Six was possibly John Drake, but that any direct confirmation of the point -- as the seventies novels had attempted -- seemed in direct contradiction of the spirit of the series.

There was a bit of a pause then, as it dawned on me that this might have been a fuller answer than B. had been entirely in need of at this point in her life. For a moment my marriage very possibly hung in the balance, then she smiled fondly and said, "Thank you, darling. That was a very thorough answer."

I'm so lucky to have her.

I Am Not a Number...

So -- my surname's ridiculous, according to 56% of the readers of this LiveJournal. Well, possibly.

There are a number of reasons I like it, though. Firstly, it's euphonious. Divorced of the actual connotations of being an English surname, it sounds like the sort of thing you might find in Tolkien (who, speaking of silly surnames...).

Secondly, both elements of it mean "Steward" in some form or other. As far as my family have been able to tell, "Hallard" appears to derive from Anglo-Saxon "Hall-ward", ie the warden of a hall. And a Purser, of course, is in charge of money and valuables on a merchant or passenger ship. If I ever use a pseudonym, it'll probably be "Steward".

Thirdly, being self-constructed, it's unlikely to be duplicated (and certainly doesn't seem to have been so far). We can be fairly sure there aren't any serial killers or conservative politicians going around using it. Even the elements of it are relatively rare, although admittedly there's already a published author named Philip Purser, who once interviewed Philip K Dick. Hallards are rarer, although my bachelor name would sem to have been shared by an American football player and a character married to Faye Dunaway.

There's also a Marta Hallard in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, and it's Basil Hallward (with a "w") who paints The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Cosmic Indifference

Hmm. I've recently finished reading Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, and I honestly can't recommend it. It reminded me of why I dislike hard sf so much, in fact.

(NB: For sf novices, "hard sf" is science fiction where the fiction appears to be in service to the science, rather than vice versa. It's a subtle distinction, but a vital one.)

It's not that the ideas in Diaspora aren't remarkable -- they are. By the end of the novel, humanity has discovered an infinite number of universes bordering ours via nanoscopic wormholes whose mouths form subatomic particles. It has fled the destruction of Earth by downloading itself, in software form, into a neighbouring universe with five spatial dimensions. It has discovered alien species including eco-engineering five-dimensional hermit crabs, and a software ecosystem "running" on an accidentally-evolved biological computer. The final sequence sees the protagonists spend ninety billion years exploring an artefact which spans twenty-seven trillion universes, and finaly realising it's a remarkably big statue, which is obviously jolly impressive.

It's just that the way it's presented is so sodding dull. The novel actually does a lot of similar things to Olaf Stapledon's classic novels Last and First Men and Star Maker, which are among the greatest things sf has ever produced. But Stapledon was primarily a writer, aware firstly that many of his readers would be far more interested in the philosophy of his multiple universes than their science, and secondly that incorporating believably human characters (even if they're only rather nebulous narrator-figures) does wonders for the reader's tolerance levels.

By contrast, Diaspora begins with half a chapter describing the mathematical algorithms by which a notionally human software sentience is derived. It's the hard-sf equivalent of a Victorian novel's "I was born", and it's astonishingly tedious. It's twelve pages before the emergent personality even gets to interact with anyone: everything up to this point has been network formation and co-ordinate sets. There's very little of what I would have found interesting -- the subjective experience of being an entity descended from humanity, but with barely even the illusion of physical existence.

Throughout the novel, personalities are seen as far less interesting than ideas (the more abstract the better), and emotions -- while their existence is acknowledged -- seem to be something of a distraction from the vitally important business of doing maths. The only people in the novel I could remotely identify with are the individuals who foolishly choose to live on in their doomed biological bodies, rather than migrating to the welcoming software environments, and they're extinct well before the halfway point.

It's not that I have any ideological objections to extropianism. It's that the lives Egan depicts for his software people are so inhumanly uninvolving. I'd rather die than live that kind of artificial afterlife, and the novel is fairly unequivocal in its view that this makes me profoundly stupid. Hey ho.

"Free Winnie": Rev-Ursine Academic Trends (and Relations)

On a more positive note, though, Postmodern Pooh, which I'm rereading currently, is magnificent. It's the 2001 follow-up to Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex, a gentle book of spoof criticism published in 1964 to noises of considerable enjoyment and appreciation. The "authors" of that "anthology" spent their time teasing out the supposed Freudian or Marxist themes, literary or religious allusions, and even evaluations of literary worth, from Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, in a thoroughly gentlemanly manner. The only "essay" inflected by critical theory lampooned it by having its author nowhere engage with the actual texts of the books he was supposedly examining.

I utterly love The Pooh Perplex, which got me through some times of disillusionment during my English degree -- but compared with it, Postmodern Pooh is vitriol-soaked dynamite. This time the very much older Crews is on the offensive, and he means it. The various vacuities of deconstructionism, New Historicism and Feminism and Marxism in their modern inflections are unflinchingly laid bare (or possibly "bear"). I (and I suspect Crews) actually have a lot of time for many of the premises and beliefs of these various schools, but like him I simply can't abide the dogma, the impenetrable jargon and the smug self-referentialism of the modern academia they've spawned.

Unlike Crews, however, I would have had neither the skill nor the patience to immerse myself thoroughly in these doctrines in order to produce such acerbic parodies, in which (for instance) the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson is admiringly compared by one of his followers with Mao Zedong, or an Oxford-educated postcolonialist dismisses the vast mass of his fellow Indians as difficult to take seriously thanks to their insufficient background in postcolonial critical theory. While the essays are spoofs, the extensive supporting material adduced by their "authors" is all real: the book apparently took Crews two years to research, and his eye for an inadvertently self-ridiculing quote is utterly merciless.

The disciple of Derrida, who opens the book by emphasising that "After we have registered the fatal instability of our concepts, they still remain our concepts, all the more precious for our awareness that they, and therefore we, fail to intersect with 'reality' at any point", and who ends her paper by degenerating into sub-Joycean gibberish culminating in a heartfelt "HIPY PAPY BTUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY!", is particularly hilarious.

To anyone who's been exposed to modern critical theory, I can't recommend this book highly enough. To anyone who hasn't, admittedly it may be a bit impenetrable.

What Dreams May Come

The promised dream blog has now materialised: I give you Petunias Thrive, at http://alephone.blogspot.com/. It strikes me now that "alephone" would have been a good title to use if I ever decide to shunt off my sporadic tedious comments about beer into a dedicated weblog, but never mind.

B. and I met up for a meal with some friends we hadn't seen for ages, in Bradford-upon-Avon on Saturday. Unfortunately we hadn't arranged to meet until 8pm, their train was delayed, the staff at The Dandy Lion had all their attention taken up by a private party (not that that had stopped them taking bookings), and we ended up having to rush our mains and skip dessert altogether in order to catch our respective last trains home at 10:30ish. This was most frustrating. The vegetarian food was OK, I guess, although rather unimaginative, and the beer (various flavours of Wadworth's) wasn't too bad. Very nice indeed to see the friends in question, though.

No other news of any interest at present. The actual administration of a writing career seems to consist largely of waiting for people to get back to you about things, while other people wait for you to get back to them about different things which you're too busy to get done because of all the waiting. Or maybe that's just Western civilisation I'm thinking of.

Busy, Busy

Various web-type updates:

1. My website now boasts some additional Extras relating to Of the City of the Saved..., including some extensive Notes on the novel (around 15,000 words' worth, actually) in the Commentary area, and an extra snippet in the Deleted Scenes. There are also some hidden extras, which I'm not going to link to. (Take note, however: the Notes are designed to be read in parallel with the novel. If you read ahead -- and even more so if you read them without reading the novel at all -- you're going to get a lot of stuff spoilered.)

2. I've added a Comments facility to this page, so that you can let me know what you think about, well, anything really. This comes courtesy of the nice people at Haloscan -- many thanks to Mags Halliday for the tip.

3. I've also registered a livejournal account (under the name "infinitarian", imaginatively enough) so that I can comment on other people's livejournals without coming up Anonymous. I don't intend to use it as a weblog: the sole entry there is a link to this blog, and I intend to keep it that way.

4. The Faction Paradox website has also been updated (not that I can take credit for that). There's no information on Of the City of the Saved... that you couldn't find elsewhere -- but still, it's very nicely presented.

Weird Dream

The other night I dreamed that I was watching daytime soap operas, a thing I never do in real life. Flagging ratings meant that the producers had introduced a lot more bonking and nudity, to boost the viewing figures. One topless woman was wearing particularly striking breast decorations in the form of giant spectacles, which framed her breasts as if they were gigantic eyes.

After a while, a pair of kidnappers gained entry to the hero's house by pretending to be murderous zombies (I didn't quite follow that bit, to be honest), and made off with his (nude) girlfriend and his pet chimpanzee. Their big mistake came in allowing the chimp to drive.

This wouldn't have been a problem -- they had the ape at gunpoint, after all -- except that, in a Twin Peaks style twist, the chimp was periodically possessed by a demon, who didn't care about the life of its host, the kidnappers, or the hero's girlfriend. The demon took control of the chimp, the chimp crashed the car, all the occupants died horribly, and then I woke up.

Following March's lucid episode, I'm considering starting a separate blog, to use exclusively as a dream diary. After all, my dream life seems to be more interesting than my waking one a lot of the time.

Oxon

B. and I spent a few days this week in Oxford: not visiting anyone, just wandering around relaxing and looking at stuff. We were staying at the Randolph, Oxford's biggest, poshest hotel (thanks to a massively cheap special offer on Tesco's part), which we found snooty and intimidating, but we managed to have a good time anyway, with plentiful trips to George and Davis'.

To an extent this was a horribly self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia, revisiting our old student haunts, but they're not wrong when they say you can never visit the same pub twice. Of course some of them had been redecorated (although some not -- this is Oxford, after all), but the main difference is that when I was a student in Oxford I drank Guinness, while B. drank cider. We used to hang around all the good pubs with our friends, but we would have been entirely blind to their attractions in terms of real ale.

This weekend we were able to remedy that, and we discovered that The Lamb and Flag has its own golden ale brewed exclusively, while the Turf's range of good beer outclasses any of the pubs in Bristol. I curse my student self for squandering such opportunities with his callow philistinism.

We also found a smashing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (which appears, peculiarly, not to have a working website), mostly consisting of temporary rooms and buildings buried in sand. Copies of the artist's book were being sold, and I snapped one up -- it's an anthology (mostly science fiction) in which even the title page, contents page etc are taken from other works, which is surpsrisingly disorientating.

It's rare to find art that's unashamedly influenced by SF, but this Mike Nelson chap seems to have absorbed Aldiss, Ballard, Dick et al, as well as some of the more depressing Soviet SF authors, and taken them to heart.

One of the rooms featured a film projector playing back a lecture given by a conspiracy theorist, in which he explained that corporate logos were all symbols of various masonic lodges and illuminati. There isn't enough of that sort of thing in contemporary art, damn it.

Next Time On...

You may distantly remember the "next writing project" I mentioned quite some time ago now, promising a running commentary on this page as I wrote it.

Well, the project I was talking about is now definite -- still confidential, unfortunately, so I can't go into much by way of actual detail, but contracts are being bandied about and will in all probability be signed very shortly. It's to be one of a series of science-fantasy-cum-detective novellas published by a British small-press publisher respected in the sf and horror field, which provides enough clues that anyone who cares enough can make a guess.

In order to persuade the publishers to publish me I had, of course, to write them a plot outline and a sample, so you won't be getting a blow-by-blow account of the story's genesis right from the beginning. Nor, for the aforementioned reasons of confidentiality, will I be going into detail as to the actual plot. And then I do have other stuff I need to be working on -- other proposals, a short story, some pre-writing ideas -- so I won't be working on it uninterrupted, either.

Even so, I'll be keeping the readers of this blog apprised of my progress, once I start making some. At present I'm awaiting a) the signing of the contract, and b) some word back from the editor on how my outline may need altering to fit into the general plan for the novella range. Once that's happened, though -- and when I get a moment free from everything else -- I'll be getting down to work. Watch this space.

City Bound

As of Thursday, I finally have a copy of Of the City of the Saved.... It isn't one of my complimentaries -- although those have now arrived as well -- but a copy I bought over the internet from a retailer in the US, and paid for them to send across the Atlantic by express mail. Look, I was desperate, OK?

It's... well, it's my book. In print. Bound together, and with a barcode on the back and everything. It has my name on the front cover, and words in it that I wrote, and an "About the Author" note relating to me. It's... very odd, actually, at first, although I've carefully acclimatised myself since it turned up by obsessively poring over it day and night. It's like having part of your mind break off, like a piece of iceberg, and float off on its own. Trite, hackneyed and lacking in a sense of proportion though the analogy is, I do see why people compare it with having children.

And it's beautiful. Obviously there are things I wish were different: there are design decisions which (while perfectly understandable and correct from Mad Norwegian Press's point of view) don't chime with the platonic version of the novel I keep inside my head; and I've spotted half a dozen typoes (not at all bad actually, for a book of its length), only one of which was my fault. Oh, and the frontispiece uses the same illustration as the one in This Town Will Never Let Us Go, rather than going with my suggestion of using Jim Calafiore's striking "Timebeast Assault" picture from The Book of the War.

Even so... as I kept remarking to my other half during the hours after I first saw it, wow.

I didn't say a lot else that evening, actually.

Johnny-Cum-Lately

What is it with the phoneme "kum" that seems to make it so bloody complicated to spell? On the one hand we have the colloquial spelling "cum" being used in place of "come" in the contexts of orgasm or ejaculate. This is a reasonable example of natural language change, and I don't mind it particularly, if only because of the splendidly smirky double entendre it adds to the mineral discovered in Cummington Massachussets, cummingtonite.

On the other hand, it seems to be increasingly common for people to use the "come" spelling where they mean to use the Latin conjunction, in phrases like "kitchen-cum-dining-room", "wife-cum-manager" or "Horton-cum-Studley". I suppose the vague idea is of a kitchen "becoming" a dining-room, but this introduces an element of process to a construction which should imply apposition alone.

I'm warning you now, if this goes on I may be forced to write a stiffly-worded letter to The Telegraph.

A Quick Note to Say...

...that Of the City of the Saved... is technically now in release, although as far as I'm aware there are no copies in the UK as yet.

Do buy it, someone's already described it as "absolutely brilliant". And that was on the Faction Paradox discussion boards, so he can hardly be biased or anything.

Anyway. There are some Extras pertaining to the novel, including Deleted Scenes and Commentary, up on my website. More Commentary will follow once I have a real copy to work from.

Trying out a new template...

Hmm. Not much of an improvement on the last one, really. I really must get around to working out how to customise this page.

Yet Another Novel Update

Well, I'm told -- that is, I was told this time last week -- that Mad Norwegian expected to receive copies of Of the City of the Saved... from the printers imminently, and to send them out to subscribers, purchasers and retailers (as well as me) more or less immediately.

So... has anyone seen an actual copy yet? I certainly haven't. But I have faith that they exist.

STOP PRESS: The copies for US people and shops are in the mail, apparently. The international copies are being delayed by rainstorms in New Orleans, which I'm told can be a bitch. So... it'll be soon. I still have faith.

Demanding Proofs

The heating was broken at work today, so that all the radiators were radiating away at maximum temperature. This isn't what you want in the South of England in mid-May, and the entire place was like a sauna, only with fewer nude Scandinavian businessmen.

To make matters worse, I was having to proofread the college magazine. This is a job that seems to fall to me twice a year on the grounds that, as a junior member of the library staff, I'm evidently the best-qualified person. (Well, perhaps it's more the three English degrees and the writing career, but even so.)

Certainly the chap who actually writes and edits the magazine has a grasp of punctuation, syntax, spelling and prose style poorer even than that of some of the English teachers. Apart from his scattershot approach to consistency in terms of brackets and quotation marks, his random deployment of dashes, commas, full stops and (since he spotted me using them in the final text) semicolons, is a wonder to behold. Sentences such as "[Student's Name] will study Theology, a subject which he says seems to add sense to life -- and death, at Random College Oxford" are not uncommon.

Most of the time I can convert such material into language, by carefully deploying punctuation of my own, along with the substitution and insertion of minor words. There are occasions, when a tiny intervention suddenly turns a string of gibberish into a surprisingly coherent sentence, which can feel elegantly satisfying (albeit more like the processes usually known as "editing" or "co-authoring" than as "proofreading").

However, I have my limits. Primarily, in this case, limits of knowledge. The sports reports are coded in dense jargon which I can't begin to unpack, resulting in sentences which -- while clearly a mess -- can't be turned into anything approaching English, at least not by me. Some of them achieve a pleasingly mesmeric effect by their constant repetition of words like "match" or "jump", but to me they might as well be automatic writing.

I don't have the necessary comprehension skills to tackle "England North v England South trials", "the England (January 1st) XV in the A.E.R. Festival" or "the Centenary of the Gloucestershire Schools". (I mean, what? Have there only been schools in Gloucestershire since 1904? Eh?) I was alarmed enough the other day, when I heard that the Prime Minister of Thailand was buying Liverpool, and imagined him dismantling the Liver Building and the Cathedrals for shipping to the Far East.

I don't mean to give the man who writes this stuff a mauling. He writes as he speaks, and his conversation is, in fact, perfectly comprehensible -- indeed, he's a good communicator, lively, charismatic and (if you happen to like that sort of thing) good company. He probably leaps out of bed in the mornings, eager to face his day of communicating.

It's just that he has no conception of the gulf between spoken and written English... which is what people like me are useful for, I suppose. Hey ho.

Books

Well, I'm over a third of the way through Pacific Edge, and enjoying it enormously. It seems to be a feature of Kim Stanley Robinson's books that any concerns are small-scale and personal, and that his (always impressive) worldbuilding goes on in the gaps between people behaving like people. It's a lovely approach, and rare in SF.

Here, the people are all muscular and healthy, enjoy softball and cycling and hard physical labour, and use video phones instead of the internet. I've mentioned before that I was ambivalent about Robinson's supposed dystopian novel in the same trilogy, The Gold Coast, on the grounds that its urbanised future of ubiquitous car use and designer drugs didn't actually seem all that bad to me. Well, I can see his utopia is an awful lot more wholesome and happy and generally good for the world... but Christ, it would be a nightmare if you didn't like sport. Even the token character-who-doesn't-like-sport secretly does really.

This isn't a pure pastoral, back-to-basics future, though -- there's a lot of discreet technology, including space engineering going on behind the scenes, and the decisions made are shown to be reliant on the advanced state of the ecological sciences. It was a smart move opening the Orange County trilogy with a novel, The Wild Coast, which shows a thoroughly rural, low-tech future, in a post-apocalyptic setting, and demonstrates exactly how grim and unpleasant such a thing would be, because otherwise those would be exactly the accusations one would aim against this novel. In fact, the three volumes of the trilogy equate to "Now, I'm not saying this would be a good thing -- but surely we need to get away from this. Wouldn't this be better?

As this bald summary suggests, there's a lot of dialectic going on in the novels -- The Wild Shore and The Gold Coast operate as thesis and antithesis in a lot of ways (pastoral / urban, isolationist / imperialist etc), and Pacific Edge rather cleverly takes the less horrible elements of both and synthesises them into something very appealing (unless you don't like sport).

So far, there seem to be a lot of useful practical tips on how to run a utopia, but Robinson himself (in one character's diary entries dating back to the generation when the utopia was established) makes the point that any utopia divorced from the history-to-date of human civilisation is fundamentally useless.

Unfortunately, from what I've been able to gather so far (and of course I will know better when I've actually finished the book), the establishment of said utopia seems to rely on everybody suddenly coming to their senses sometime in the 2010s, and adopting the broadly socialist and environmentalist principles around which the new social structures are based. Those structures are extremely interesting (although there's rather a lot of material about the practicalities of water distribution), but the initial premise there seems currently unlikely. I'm sure these events will be fleshed out later in the novel, but Robinson has his work cut out to convince me that such a change of heart is at all likely.

What is worrying is that, of the three books in the trilogy, the utopia and the post-apocalyptic novel depend for their future history on specific anomalous events happening which cause the course of history to diverge from the predicted. The dystopia just relies on things carrying on the way they are. Perhaps this is just in the nature of dystopias, which Kingsley Amis once described as "an instrument of social diagnosis and warning". Still... brr.

Beer

Very pleasant weekend. After a really good Italian meal out for a friend's pre-nuptial bash on Friday night (she's getting married in Mauritius, so it's the nearest we'll come to the actual wedding), we headed over to the other side of the country on Saturday morning, to meet up with other friends for the East Anglian Beer Festival in Bury St Edmunds.

This was a smaller affair than the Bristol equivalent, and what's more had been going on since Wednesday, such that a number of the more interesting-sounding beers were sold out by the Saturday. Nevertheless, we got to sample some decent beerish substances, including Iceni's Ported Porter, which was very dark and complex, and Buffy's Roger's Ruin, a mild-tasting and extremely drinkable golden beer which just happens to be 6.5% strength and capable of putting you under the table.

We followed this up in the evening with a visit to the Old Cannon in BSE, a pub-cum-brewery which does two excellent beers of its own, Gunner's Daughter and Powder Monkey, as well as some nice guest ales. On Sunday we visited some other friends in Cambridgeshire, ate a very nice Thai meal and looked around their lovely house before heading home.

OK, so it's not what you'd call thrilling, but I'm 32. Frankly, anything which gets me out of the house and / or my slippers is something to be thankful for.

Stuff

There's relatively little news on the writing front at the moment: I've finished the short story (title now cropped to "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants" -- still ironic but rather less overblown, I feel), sent it off and got paid for it, all in the last couple of days. I'm faintly stunned by this -- the fact that I have a life where this sort of thing can happen still bewilders me somewhat.

Of the City of the Saved... is still due out sometime very soon -- the latest I've heard is still "early May", so we'll have to see. I have some goodies ready to put up on the website once it's out, although I may not have time to complete the "Commentary" segment I was hoping to manage.

Finally, I now own the thoroughly impressive "Timebeast Assault" artwork from The Book of the War, by comics artist Jim Calafiore. If you've seen the piece in question, you'll know it's great. If not, I believe it's being reprinted as the frontispiece to Of the City of the Saved..., so there's another incentive for you to buy the thing.

Really Not My Field

Yesterday I got horribly lost within a few minutes' walk of my work.

My scooter had packed up on the way to work in the morning, and I had had to leave it in a quiet cul-de-sac and return for it later. Since I was supposed to be working, I tried to minimise the time I took to collect it by taking what the Bristol A to Z suggested would be a brisk short cut.

The route I'd deduced from the map took me first through an industrial estate, which was easy enough. It then entered a field. Given the lack of buildings on the map I had been expecting some kind of parkish sort of area, or possibly an industrial waste ground. But this was definitely a field, which made me nervous. Parks count as City, but fields are definitely Countryside as far as I'm concerned. Someone had planted a huge chunk of countryside right in the middle of my city.

(Well, that's how it felt. In fact, work is on the South-East outskirts of Bristol, but these days it makes more sense to consider Bristol and Bath as a single conurbation, rather than than as separate entities. Certainly everything around the afflicted area consists of city -- industrial estates, garages, schools, police stations, lots of houses, all that sort of thing.)

On the other hand, the field had a huge electricity pylon in it, which was a clear sign that there must be further civilisation on the other side of it. I climbed a stile, stepped onto uneven turf and followed what I thought must be the route of the footpath I identified.

I usually have a pretty good sense of direction -- but then I usually operate in humanity's natural habitat, where there are grids of roads, walls, lamp-posts, street signs, offices and shops to act as clear direction markers. In the countryside the best you have are trees, fences and mud, and those aren't laid out with any kind of planning or consistency. It wasn't long before I had lost sight of the comforting pylon, and had no idea where I was.

Now, I wouldn't like you to misunderstand me here -- I do like the countryside. I approve of its being there. I like to look at it from motorways and trains. It's definitely a Good Thing.

I've even been known to walk in it voluntarily, using a map to navigate between pleasant country pubs. However, when I do this voluntarily, I don't usually do it in: a) April, b) the rain, or c) my work shoes. Now I was doing all three. The area of countryside was surprisingly large once you were in it, and had nothing you could reasonably call a path, although occasional stiles in the fences implied directions in which notional paths might be considered as existing. Otherwise, mud, trees, fences and grass were about it.

It became clear that I'd lost myself badly when I eventually came to the point where jungle turned into city again, and I couldn't find any way through. One field skirted the edge of a primary school, which was fenced off with barbed wire and guard posts. (I exaggerate, but only slightly). There seemed to be no access there. The next field held cows.

I'm very fond of animals, and I have nothing against cows usually, but these ones were malignant. I'm a vegetarian, but I consume dairy products, and I'm convinced that these cows somehow knew. Their moist brown eyes said to me "You have colluded in our imprisonment, and you will pay. One day we will rise, heffer and bullock, Jersey and Friesian, down to the tiniest newborn veal calf, and we will take this planet back. Our children will roam the ruins of your primate cities in vast herds, munching gently at the uncultivated remnants of your lawns and bushes. On that day your hypocrisy will not protect you, vegetarian. MMMRRRROOOOO!"

I'll be honest. I felt cowed.

Braving the bovine gaze, I eventually reached the other side of the field, and found a stile through into an alley. This was grassed over, but it sat behind a terrace of houses: it therefore counted as city, not as untamed wilderness. If I looked over the fences of the houses, I could even see down a driveway to a relief-ridden view of tarmac. Fighting the urge to hurdle the fence, run down the driveway and throw myself joyfully into the path of any oncoming car, I walked along the terraces until I found a route back to a street.

I was nowhere near where I'd intended to emerge, nowhere near my scooter and perhaps three minutes' walk from work. There was no conceivable way I could have walked in the direction I had walked and ended up where I was. I had passed through some kind of space-warping trap for the unwary city-dweller, or perhaps been a victim of the trickery of the wild god Pan.

Chastened, I walked the rest of the way on pavement, as nature intended.

The moped was fine, oddly enough.

A Librarian Writes

I'm happy, to an extent, when our (16 to 18 year old) students re-shelve the books they've been using when they're finished. It makes my job very slightly easier, provided:
a) they take the alphabet into account;
b) they take the Dewey Decimal system into account;
c) they accept that books on a shelf go a particular way up;
d) they accept that books on a shelf should have their spines facing outward and their pages facing inward;
e) they agree with me that shelved books should be fitted between other books, and not on top of them, underneath them, around them, inside them, slumped horizontally at the end of the shelf or some ghastly combination of all of the above.

If a student doesn't feel able to go along with all of the above, then frankly I'd really rather do it myself.

Hello, Good Evening and...

Bollocks. I seem to have let this weblog lie dormant for over two weeks, again. I must be more diligently, clearly, or else decide to call this a fortnightly weblog rather than a weekly one.

(Interesting fact: When I tutored American exchange students in Oxford, "fortnight" was the standard English word which they most frequently failed to understand. I don't mean just because of my accent -- the English they were used to simply didn't include the item of vocabulary. The second most common was "bollocks".)

In the past fortnight, Mad Norwegian Press have announced that Of the City of the Saved... is likely to be available in early May, which is frighteningly soon now. Unfortunately, the promised hardback copies will not be materialising, as they've proved (with The Book of the War and This Town Will Never Let Us Go) to be uneconomical.

I've also been hard at work writing the short story I mentioned here recently, which I still can't tell you anything else about. Well, except that it's called "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants! (and other works)", which gives you some idea.

Hay Dude

B. and I visited Hay-on-Wye at the weekend, with a long list of books we wanted to find. We came away with a large stack of books. The list and the stack had an overlap of a couple of volumes, which shows equally how fun and how frustrating secondhand-bookshopping can be. On the plus side, I now own Kim Stanley Robinson's A Memory of Whiteness, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Greg Egan's Diaspora, a stack of Pocket Canons and several more books by Paul McAuley. On the minus side, I still don't have Robinson's Mars books, Paul Cornell's British Summertime, Justina Robson's Natural History, any more books by Kim Newman or anything at all by Mark Chadbourn that isn't his Doctor Who novella, Wonderland.

Hay itself is a marvellous place -- an entire town infected by the well-established space-warping properties of large concentrations of secondhand books, so that its streets fail to meet up when they should do and the Bookshop Map (issued at Tourist Information and in the bookshops themselves) appears to bear more or less no resemblance to the layout on the ground. Some of the bookshops themselves go back for miles, taking up far more space than can possibly be there.

I don't know what Hay's history is, but it's clear that, at some point in the distant past, it passed the secondhand book equivalent of Douglas Adams's Shoe Event Horizon, since which it has been more economical to open a secondhand bookshop there than any other kind of business. What's weird is why this would have happened to an obscure, and not enormously accessible, town in the Welsh Marches. There's a short story in there somewhere, I'm sure.

Three Studies In Orange

I recently finished Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, the second volume in his Orange County Trilogy (also known as Three Californias). The three novels describe alternative futures for Orange County, California, as seen from the vantage point of the mid-to-late 1980s. Broadly speaking, they fall into three different sub-genres of science fiction: post-apocalyptic, dystopia and utopia. I've not read very much Robinson -- The Wild Shore (which is the first of this trilogy) and the fantastic The Years of Rice and Salt being about it -- but I'm impressed by the emotional depth of his writing and his technical skill. I'd be the last to suggest that science fiction as a genre lacks literacy, but voices of Robinson's strength are rare in any genre. His prose occasionally skirts the edges of being portentous, but never passes over it, at least not in anything I've read so far.

Supposedly, The Gold Coast is the dystopia of the triptych, although to be honest I'd prefer to live there than in the frankly grim post-holocaust pastoral world of The Wild Shore. Then again, part of the dystopian message of TGC is that the US has it good at everybody else's expense (the reverse situation to that of TWS, where the UN has quarantined it for everyone else's sake). I've read that TGC is one of Robinson's weaker novels, but I found it excellent. Its present-tense and third-person narrative demonstrate immediacy and impersonality where TWS's first-person voice was reflective and subjective. It's interspersed with poetic fragments which (as they themselves keep reminding us) resemble shopping lists, with the refrain "You live here, too".

I had trouble experiencing TGC as a dystopia, although it has some of the classic hallmarks: its characters if anything seem to lead rather full lives, albeit ones subject to ennui. I am, of course, a big fan of urban settings in science fiction (perhaps why I react so badly to the post-apocalyptic subgenre), and the fact that this dystopia is over-urbanised, car-dependent (the first page refers to it as "autopia") and media-saturated fills me with considerably less horror than it would some. Interestingly this future has a lot in common with that of the cyberpunk novel, particularly of William Gibson's Neuromancer, published three years earlier: corporate businesses run the show, designer drugs are the norm, multi-media streaming has replaced traditional art forms and individuals have lost all sense of focus. Significantly, though, Robinson does not see humanity merging itself with technology, and at one point one of his characters insists forcibly: "Jim, no one gives a fuck about computers". What's more, continuity with the past, rather than disjointed history, is emphasised: Robinson wants us, after all, to believe that this is a possible future for a specific place in southern California.

I'm eagerly anticipating reading the third volume, Pacific Edge (a big thank you to the Bristol City Council Library Service, if they're reading, for tracking down all three novels for me). Given the links and resonances between the first two books -- night swims, excursions to Catalina and to the USSR, a medic dealing with the death of an intimate, betrayal by a supposedly honourable "resistance" -- the scope of Robinson's ambition in the trilogy is clearly wide, and I'm looking forward to appreciating its full range.

In the meantime, though, I'm left contemplating an America effectively run from the Pentagon, embroiled in unnecessary wars for propaganda's sake against opponents it has itself armed, enriching itself at the expense of the rest of the world while it precipitates ecological meltdown at home and abroad. Arguably only a political illiterate would claim that this is the world we're actually living in, sixteen years later -- but I'd like to think most of us would baulk at claiming there was nothing familiar about it.

Admittedly Robinson gets some details entirely wrong -- predictably, America's main adversary is the Soviet bloc, and the characters (who have carphones but no mobiles) still think CDs are a pretty neat idea. Still, given that The Wild Shore saw civilisation falling, not through open war, but from the effects of international terrorism, I'm becoming rather eager to discover how Pacific Edge envisages a utopia coming to pass.