Raiders of the Lost Archive

The hassle I've been having with my computer means I'm behind again on my writing schedule, despite having managed another chapter ("induplicitous", "miffed", "slaughter") this weekend. So, rather than updating here with details of what I've been doing recently (not that there's been a great deal of that), it's time for the next passage of my abortive pulp-steampunk novel, The Curse of Odin-Hotep.

The story so far: in an alternative history where Queen Victoria's British Empire has survived until the turn of the twenty-first century, the Vault is a repository of terrifyingly potent plot-devices which Her Majesty's Government has locked away for the protection of her subjects. However, in an utterly shocking twist, someone's sneaked in and stolen something anyway.

Now read on...

Some hours later, Private Percy Hoskins of the Royal Archivists was feeling terribly uncomfortable.

Unlike most of his fellows, Percy found that the Vault made him nervous at the best of times. The rumours about the stuff hidden away down here were lurid, colourful and almost universally derided. Of course Percy, like his mates, affected to pooh-pooh them all, but sometimes, when he walked these crated alleys late at night, he couldn’t help thinking he heard things.

Things like a whistling sound, that could have been a distant voice or flute. Or a quiet ticking, as of some machinery whose timer had been accidentally activated by the self-immolation of a curious insect. Or the frantic scrabbling of claws or fingernails...

Percy had come to realise that he might, just possibly, have too much imagination for this job.

As an enlisted Archivist he had no choice but to take his monthly turn of duty in the Vault, of course, but for some time now Percy had seriously been considering applying for a transfer to another unit. Of course his mates would have a field day taking the pee, and Doris would – at the very least – look at him scornfully, but still, for the sake of his peace of mind, it had to be done.

It would have to be as far away as possible, of course. Even without him having to patrol the place personally, he’d know the Vault was still there. Some posting in the Colonial Police would do, somewhere hot. Venus would do him nicely, or perhaps Mercury.

The Moon, he thought, would feel a little close for comfort.

‘Are you still with us, Private?’ Lieutenant Flackson’s tone was curt and sarcastic.

‘Yes sir,’ said Percy, coming back to reality with a jolt. ‘Still here, sir.’

‘Perhaps, then,’ Flackson drawled, ‘you might comply with Sir Malcolm’s very reasonable request, and tell him what happened? If it isn’t too much trouble for you, Private.’

Percy was bright enough to see that the Lieutenant was scared witless – not that there was too much wit to lose, in Flogger Flackson’s case – and making up for it as best he knew, by taking it out on Percy. Shoot the messenger, that was old Flogger.

If he was honest – and Percy’s honesty was one of many things that held him back in his chosen career – he could hardly blame his superior for having the wind up. Sir Malcolm Myers was not a reassuring person. The civil servant’s high forehead was liver-spotted, and his black eyes glittered with impatience. His beaky nose jutted forward from his face as if he fancied pecking Percy’s eyes out. He reminded Percy of the ravens they’d seen when he took Doris on a day out to the Tower.

‘Well, sir,’ Percy began. ‘I was on routine patrol with Ginge –’ (he looked across at Private ‘Ginger’ Grainger, but received no support there) ‘– with Private Grainger, sir, when I hears this... creaking noise. Like...’ Like a coffin lid being lifted from the inside, he wanted to say. Like a door opening onto an ever-descending staircase down to Hell. He settled for something less controversial: ‘...like nails being levered out of a crate, sir.’

‘And this was when?’

‘Five, six hours ago now, sir. Round eleven o’clock.’

‘I see. And what did you do?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Percy again. He shifted uncomfortably and tried again to catch Ginge’s eye. As before, he failed. ‘At first, sir, I just sort of ignored it.’

‘Ignored it,’ Sir Malcolm repeated, without any special emphasis.

‘That’s right, sir. Sometimes, down here, you... hear things. Crates settling, I expect. Or... the ventilators going on the blink. Sometimes it’s the other blokes mucking around, trying to scare you.’

‘I see.’ Sir Malcolm’s voice was grim. ‘Go on.’

‘Yes, sir. I didn’t do nothing about it for a bit, for the reasons I just outlined, sir. But it went on, so I says to Gin– to Private Grainger, “Do you hear that?” And he says, “Hear what?” and I says –’

‘Sir Malcolm doesn’t require the minutes of your conversation,’ Flackson snapped.

‘No, sir. So he says, “No, I can’t hear nothing,” sir. So we went and looked. It sounded like it came from the next aisle –’

‘The aisle we’re in now?’ Sir Malcolm indicated the double-wall of crates surrounding them.

‘Yes, sir. We couldn’t see nothing amiss, though, so we reckoned it was just my ears playing tricks on me.’ Ginge had taken the pee out of him for it, obviously, but this bigwig didn’t need to hear about that. ‘It was only later, when I come back this way again with Bedford –’ (‘Beggar’ Bedford, who up to this point had been listening intently to Percy’s account, now shifted his focus abruptly to the same piece of middle distance as was occupying Ginger’s attention) ‘– that I noticed.’

‘Indeed,’ Sir Malcolm said, turning his beady eyes towards the Travers crate.

Each nail – and there were perhaps a dozen of them to an edge – stood out an inch or so proud of the crate’s closest surface. Thus loosened, the wooden face had slipped to one side very slightly, tracing a narrow line of ominous blackness. ‘And what did you do then?’

‘Orders says we ain’t ever to open up the crates, sir, not under any circumstances, unless there’s a senior officer present. So the Sarge called Lieutenant Flackson, sir, and he got hold of Captain Henshaw. And then the Captain put a call through to the Major, who got in touch with –’

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Sir Malcolm absently, ‘I am familiar with the chain of command.’ The mandarin stared across to where a sizeable proportion of it was standing, from Captain Henshaw right up to a bushy-sideburned General. ‘And during all of this time, it occurred to nobody to look inside the Travers crate and ascertain whether the contents were missing?’

It seemed the officers had all joined Grainger and Bedford in their middle-distance-watching club. Each face – pallid or florid, smooth-cheeked or white-whiskered – held an expression that implied that somebody here was in very serious trouble, and by Gad the face’s owner was glad it wasn’t him.

‘Well, sir,’ said Percy yet again, wondering how it had fallen to him to act as spokesman for the entire British Army, ‘nobody knew what was supposed to be inside, sir. It could have been –’ there didn’t seem to be any more delicate way of putting this ‘– it could have been something really bloody dangerous, sir. Pardon my French.’

Sir Malcolm’s upper lip twitched. ‘Hoskins,’ he said balefully, ‘I think that may well be the first sensible thing anybody’s said to me this morning. The contents of that crate could, indeed, be something bloody dangerous.’

He turned towards the Travers crate. ‘Let’s have a look at them, shall we?’

Percy swallowed.

‘Come on, then, man,’ Flogger barked behind him, ‘we haven’t got all day.’

Percy stepped forward and gripped the side of the crate. He lifted it away, keeping the wood between his body and whatever was inside the box. Behind him, as it came away, he felt Bedford, Grainger and the assembled officers flinch as one man.

He peered across the rim of his improvised shield at the crate’s interior. Some ancient strands of dried-up packing straw wafted free into the light, leaving behind them nothing but a yawning wooden emptiness.

Whatever it was that the Government had confiscated from T G Travers a century before, it seemed that someone else had taken it into their own safe-keeping.


[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005.]

There's only one more of these, and it isn't very long or particularly exciting. Still, Vivat Regina, eh?

Arrrrhhh!

Since 2000 or so I've been using Norton for all my antivirus needs. Recently, however I've found it turning into an elderly prima donna: bloated and slow, demanding of attention, insistent on getting its own way and calling everything else to a halt whenever it deigns to perform.

With my yearly subscription about to expire, I decided I really didn't want to pay any more for the privilege of its company, so I've just been installing the splendidly-named Avast!, a freeware anti-virus application recommended me by friends (thanks chaps).

So far Avast! has been a lot more friendly (I'm running a scan while typing this, which would have been quite excruciating with Norton), though the siren noise it makes when it finds something amiss is a little terrifying.

It's also taken me all bloody afternoon to get it working properly, primarily because Norton simply refuses to work with these amateurs, and deliberately hangs around outstaying its welcome, perhaps in the hope of flowers from the audience. Gah. I think I've got rid of it all now, but it's been a grade-A pain.

And I'm particularly glad I've done it, as I now see from that Wikipedia article that Norton 2007 is completely incompatible with ZoneAlarm, which I'm also using. Bastards.

Ah...

...Surefish have put my new column up. Look, giant space mirrors!

All Beer and Skittles

Yesterday afternoon at the Bristol Beer Festival was thoroughly splendid, although I really need to learn that what I need after these things is a nice lie down and a cup of tea, rather than going on to a pub to drink more beer.

I didn't end up listening to Iain Banks in the end on account of being just too bloody tired, and left Silk to make his way home from Bath alone. Then I stayed awake all night anyway. Never mind.

The Festival itself was fantastic, though, with twelve of us (and about 1,500 to 2,000 other people) crammed into the Brunel Passenger Shed at Temple Meads Station. 130 beers were there, many of which I had at least a sip of and several of which I quaffed heartily.

I made some tasting notes, which -- my memory being what it is after a Beer Festival -- are my best clue now as to which ones I tried and how I thought they tasted. Based on these, I seem to have sampled at least 27 beers, and there were probably others I failed to write down.

I won't list all of them here, but these were a few of the more notable. (They're mostly stouts or porters because those are the beers whose flavours I find most interesting, though for actual drinking I generally favour the lighter stuff.)

Bristol Beer Factory Milk Stout: I think I voted for this one as Beer of the Festival. My tasting notes read "Wow. Mm. Bacony. Refreshing," and it was indeed smoky yet surprisingly drinkable. I may have somewhat swayed by loyalty to a local brewery, but the beer was genuinely special.

Downton's Chimera I.P.A.: Interestingly, the CAMRA leaflet calls this "a proper I.P.A. at more like the strength that they were intended to be" -- that being, in this case, an imposing 6.8%. The flavour was gorgeous ("chewy & crunchy" according to my notes). We liked.

Fuller's Golden Pride: Rare in pubs, this was another strong golden beer, very complex in flavour, which we all agreed was "Really decent," and also "Brandyy". Good stuff.

Garton's Liquid Lobotomy Stout: A deep black stout apparently derived from a Victorian recipe (though presumably renamed). My notes read "Molasses & stuff", and I remember it being very smoky and treacly.

Hambleton Nightmare Porter: Rightly described in the leaflet as "One of the great dark beers of Britain", and by me as "Complex and confusing. Good with Maltesers."

Isle of Arran's Arran Sunset: A lovely fresh-tasting summer beer, for which my tasting notes read "Refreshing hoppy boing."

Orkney Skullsplitter: A barley wine which was so flavoursome and sweet I actually found it quite difficult to drink. Possibly because it was living up to its name, I failed to make any tasting notes about it at all.

Valhalla Sjolmet Stout: A Shetland stout, surly and sinister but with a surprising fruitiness which made it very drinkable. My verdict: "Smoky".

Others we were less keen on included Keynsham's Stockwood Stout, which was just too sweet for me, Farmer's Ales' A Drop of Nelson's Blood, which CAMRA seem to like but which had an unpleasant brussels-sprouty aftertaste, and Hidden Depths, which we thought must have been named ironically. (It was perfectly decent, but generic. The Hidden Brewery have recently taken over the Cornubia pub in central Bristol, though, saving it from closing, and therefore deserve support.)

Rather nice pasties and utterly bog-standard crisps were on sale as well, to soak up the beer. That Beer Festival comedy staple, the queue for the Gents', was much in evidence, and caused the usual hiliarity among the women popping in and out of the almost empty Ladies'. I enjoyed a startling freak success at the table skittles, and won a smart new Young's bar-towel to replace the ratty old Guinness towel the cats sit on.

B. and I also made a drunken clothing-buying decision, as a result of which I'm now wearing a T-shirt with an parody Intel logo reading "real ale inside". This seems inexplicably less hilarious and witty than it did yesterday afternoon.

A damn good day out, all told, and one I shall try to repeat next year, with appropriate variations.

Signature Recognition

The latest Doctor Who Magazine has a very pleasing review by Matt Michael of Short Trips: Time Signature. I've been ambivalent about a previous review of Matt's, but this one lavishes Simon's anthology with well-deserved praise.

My favourite sentences are, predictably, these two:

"The Ruins of Time" by Philip Purser-Hallard has the First Doctor and his companions materialise on the planet Torcaldi, where time can be stolen as though it's a commodity, leaving burgled individuals frozen eternally. Purser-Hallard skilfully evokes the atmosphere of the early Hartnell episodes, where each new world is a dangerous and mysterious environment, and the result is quietly masterful.

Let's just read that last bit again, shall we?

...and the result is quietly masterful.

Yes, lets.

Matt is equally fulsome about some other stories in the collection, notably Ben Aaronivitch's "Gone Fishing", Jonathan Clements' "Second Contact" and Joff Brown's "Walking City Blues", all of which I too thought were excellent.

In the same issue Vanessa Bishop is also very positive about Collected Works, although at less length and with no direct mention of my quiet masterfulness. She seems to have liked the Quire, though.

Books Update: Eligible Spatula

In the past three weeks, I've finished three books. Reading, unfortunately, not writing. Two of these have been rereads, which is unusual.

Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman is classic prose Doctor Who, from the era when the novels were at their strongest -- far outstripping in sophistication and depth, anything a range marketed under the banner of an ongoing T.V. series could possibly be. Return is character-driven S.F., the story of Bernice Summerfield's search for her lost father, and of the rivalry and reconciliation between him, her new husband Jason and her mentor, the seventh Doctor. It deals with love, loss, friendship, betrayal, humanity, alienation, existential terror and a sentient spatula called Graeme, and presents them all with utter conviction (perhaps slightly less so with Graeme). It's my favourite of Kate's Virgin-era novels, and Kate's one of my favourite authors. Read this book! Read Kate's other books! Pre-order the book Kate, Jon and I are writing together!

Pashazade: The First Arabesk was my first exposure to the much-hyped Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and I'm unconvinced. Given the potential richness and complexity of the setting ("El Iskandryia", the German-Allied Alexandria of an Islamic Ottoman Empire in the post-cyberpunk mid-21st century of a history where the 1914 Balkans conflict never escalated into a World War), Grimwood provides remarkably little by way of detailed worldbuilding. A writer can expect a reader to extrapolate a panorama from a miniature -- building up vast imaginary worlds from throwaway lines -- but not vice versa. Grimwood seems more interested in his protagonist, who has the opposite problem of being given so many personal, psychological and technological quirks that he seems scarcely believable either. The detective plot's reasonably clever, however, and the prose, at least, is very slick and shiny. I'll probably read the sequels at some point.

I've written about The Pooh Perplex (1964) by Frederick C Crews here before... and with good reason, as I tend to reread it every couple of years or so. I doubt I own a book I've read more times, except for the Pooh books themselves, which like the Perplex itself I use for comfort reading whenever I'm feeling ill or unhappy. If you love Milne's work, and hold literary critics in a kind of suspension of affection and contempt, then it's one of the funniest books it's possible to read. I've now moved on to Crews' much savager (but equally funny) late sequel, Postmodern Pooh (2001).

In addition to PoPooh, I'm currently reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (who Silk and I are going, perhaps ill-advisedly, to hear speak after the Beer Festival on Saturday) and Accelerando by Charles Stross. I haven't yet got far enough into the Banks to form an opinion (though it hasn't grabbed me on the first page the way, say, Complicity or The Crow Road did), but the Stross is remarkable. I thought at first that it was just another trendy information-dense post-cyberpunk screed, and wondered whether mightn't actually be enough of those in the world already. A third of the way through, though, it's shaping up to be something altogether more interesting. More on this later.

Force Feeding

Apologies to all of you whose feeds have been spammed by my overenthusiastic tagging last night. Blogger have introduced tag technology, but not the functionality of tagging a previous post without republishing it altogether. This means a lot of posts may have reappeared in people's friends lists or wherever.

I've also been conspicuously overtagging, and seem to have ended up with 42 of the things -- some of them probably more useful than others. This is partly out of an abundance of enthusiasm at discovering exciting new functionality; partly due to a mild case of autism from recent overwork; and partly due to the fact that my posts don't tend to have a single clearly-defined subject, instead banging on about different topics, summarising events and making comparisons between things and other things.

In any case, some of the tags are redundant and some of them probably spurious, but I don't have time to fix that for the moment. At some point when I have a day free I'll go through rationalising the tags for the whole blog, including tagging the early stuff. This will cause another splurge in your feeds, but after that there shouldn't be any more.

Meanwhile, I am Most Displeased with both Sky One and Virgin Media (who weren't even our T.V. providers until they bought out Telewest, the bastards). Thanks to the joint coporate greed of (bloody) Branson and (even bloodier) Murdoch, B. and I won't get to see any more Battlestar Galactica until the Season Three boxed set comes out. Among other things this screws up my vague idea for a talk to pitch to Greenbelt this year.

(Unless, that is, I decide to violate Sky One's intellectual property and compromise my own principles by illegally bittorrenting B.S.G. instead. Which is an option I find sorely tempting right now, I have to say.)

On the plus side, writing's gone well today and I've finished another chapter (sample words: "aqualung", "Neolithic", "plonker", plus three different types of shag). And the day after tomorrow there's beer. So life isn't all bad.

You're It

Ooh look, I've got tags.

[Edit: Although tagging all my past posts is going to take quite some time, I, er, seem to have done the first year's worth this afternoon. The novelty's beginning to wear off now.]

I gather from the stony silence which met my last post that I'm the only one who finds that video link amusing as well as offensive. Oh well.

I'm still embroiled in novella writing, so I'm still not getting much time to update the blog [Edit: Not that you'd think it from the way I've just spent my afternoon, but never mind]. I can't say much about the book before at least a blurb is publicised, hence the succession of rather dull wordcount figures I've been subjecting you all to recently. I can, however, reveal that the last chapter I completed contained the words "crabmeat", "volcanic", and "quarterstaff", plus explicit depictions of caffeine consumption.

Other than that -- and a certain amount of what we used to call "mindless absorption of pop culture" when I was at Oxford, but which would probably now have to be described using the words "product" and "consumer" -- it's mostly been work of one kind or another.

Pleasant exceptions have included a couple of brunches out with B. (which we deserve, this being the busiest time of her working year as well as mine so far) and the anticipation of Bristol Beer Festival this coming Saturday. Unpleasant things have included being told "I'm sorry, I thought you were young," by someone in her twenties, who went on to imply that I looked over forty. Bah.

Additional Vaultage

I've spent the last few days revising and writing more of the novella. Current word count is roughly 18,000 out of 25,000 words, although as I have at least 9,000 still to write it's looking like I'll be overrunning a little.

(Oh, and I've written the Giant Space Mirrors column. Watch this blog for news of its appearance at Surefish.)

I've also been reading books and watching TV, but I'm probably not going to get the time to blog them for a short while yet. Life on Mars is good, though.

Fortunately, I have some more of The Curse of Odin-Hotep in reserve.

The first sign of the burglar’s arrival was the careful removal of a grille set into the ceiling, protecting the bottom of a ventilation shaft. It was a time-consuming process, as each strand of the grille had to be sawn through individually and silently, without alerting the patrols of Royal Archivists in the Vault below.

This done, the grille was lifted gently up the shaft, from which the intruder’s balaclavaed head emerged almost at once to peer down into the Vault. A pair of gloved hands followed, and soon the body that connected them was wriggling, sloughing off the tightness of the shaft with painful slowness, until its hips came free and it fell.

The figure twisted in the air with agile and uncanny freedom to land crouching, feet-first, upon the nearest stack of crates. It was still holding the detached grille of the ventilator and the handsaw, both of which it placed quietly upon the wooden slats of the topmost crate. Its night-black clothing, set about with bulging nodes, vibrated silently with obscure energy.

A quick glance around reassured the thief that the untoward presence in the Vault had not been noticed. The Archivists were changing shifts at present, and were occupied in the complicated security protocols associated with the process.

The figure stepped to the edge of the wall of crates, and dropped – lightly again, and gracefully – down to the concrete floor. It paused a moment to examine the lettering on the nearest crate, then headed purposefully away along the alleyway.

Despite some knowledge of the basic filing algorithms, the search was not an easy one, and it was not long before the Archivists had successfully negotiated their defensive rituals. The burglar had some idea of the pattern which their patrols would be following, and took an altogether different route among the crates.

Name after name, date after date, presented themselves, identifying men and years long lost to the world: P ASKWITH – 1940. DR C T MONTAGUE – 1909. W L WONG – 1956.

A soldier turned the corner at the far end of the alley, his head turned back to call behind him to his mate. Quick as a snake, the thief leapt limberly onto the nearest, mercifully low, wall of crates. Clambering to the top the intruder lay still, coveralls throbbing gently, breathing as unobtrusively as possible.

Had the Archivist noticed something amiss? Had he been ordered to vary his routine from time to time? Was he just bored?

The danger of discovery passed with the echo of his boots.

Five minutes later, the thief was examining one of the oldest crates, whose yellow wood and greying stencilled letters spelled out the inscription: T G TRAVERS – 1896.

In one deft movement, the figure unbuttoned a pocket at its thigh and withdrew a short and slender crowbar.


[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005.]

Can you guess the later twist about the burglar's identity, gentlemen and -- quite possibly -- ladies?

...I'm going to run out of this sample at some point, probably before I stop being so busy. I may have to resort to posting links to amusing videos.

(Oh, all right then. WARNING: The above link is not for the easily offended, especially sincere believers in the divinity of Mel Gibson.)

Of Books and Bacilli

I've been struck down by the cold-with-a-side-order-of-nervous- exhaustion which seems to have been circulating the country this winter, so have spent the last day or so doing very little. Which is restful, though it doesn't seem to be making me any less tired. B. is similarly afflicted, but has been having to go into work anyway, poor love.

This means that very little's happened to me recently. The novella's going O.K., although I've had to revise my schedule to fit in my recent indolence. I need to write this month's Surefish column by Friday.

I've been reading Pashazade, which is... well, as I've said on a mailing list, it's clever, and the prose is pretty slick, but it all seems strangely soulless. The ideas are interesting, the setting is interesting, even the story could be interesting if I cared about the characters, but it's all so attenuated and substanceless, like certain very wrong people accuse William Gibson of being.

Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, on the other hand, is great. I'll try to give it a proper writeup once I'm back on form.

Meanwhile, the best I can do is to leave you with some more of the opening chapter of my pulp steampunk novel that would have been, The Curse of Odin-Hotep:

The Archives of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government were a labyrinth. Located underneath the capital for reasons of supreme security, their tunnels spread for miles beneath the city, connecting Downing Street with the Bank of England and Great Scotland Yard with the Tower of London. Reputedly one divergent branch stretched out as far as Lord’s cricket ground, to which, at the demand of certain of the Whitehall mandarins who frequented the tunnels, it also provided access.

All of these corridors were lined with paper files, boxes and ledgers, most of them filthy with accreted cobwebbed grime. Every step taken was muffled, all its resonance absorbed by dusty stacks of paperwork.

Each shelf bore a brass rail along which, very rarely, automatic filing devices would skitter, search-and-retrieval schedules mapped out for them by the great governmental engine-houses in Vauxhall and Battersea, whose tenders had named them, in a fit of uncharacteristic whimsy, after the city’s legendary protectors Gog and Magog.

Ingress to this vast archival root-network was through strong metal doors: dozens of them across the capital, to be sure, but each stoutly defended against unauthorised admission. A battery of craniometers and phrenological comparators ensured that the only persons admitted were those whose facial features and cranial contours were in perfect correspondence with one of the thousands of punch-cards held by Gog at Vauxhall. In case of differences of opinion, these devices were backed up by Royal Archivists armed with electric rifles.

There was, or should have been, no possibility of an intruder gaining access to the secrets, tedious though many of them may have been, which the Archives held.

Nowhere was this truer than the Vault.

The Vault was where Her Majesty’s Government put all the things for which it would have preferred not to be responsible, but which it certainly would not have wanted anybody else to get their hands on. Vials of highly virulent experimental bacilli; ancient relics of reputed occult power; blueprints and prototypes for devices too infernal ever to be built; scandalous information relating to half the crowned heads of Europe (the half, some of the Archivists suggested ribaldly, for whom the scandals in question were not already public knowledge): all of them ended up, sooner or later, inside the Vault.

It lay deep beneath Bloomsbury, deep below the British Museum’s own enormous vaults and cellars: a great echoing space which could have easily contained a concert hall or ballroom (such cultured metaphors came naturally to the men who had commissioned and designed the Vault). It was laid out in a dozen aisles stacked with wooden crates, thousands in all, identical in size but of visibly varying ages. They reached halfway to the ceiling, each neatly stencilled with a legend identifying its donor (willing or unwilling) and the year of its acquisition.

These names and dates gave little indication of the boxes’ contents, and deliberately so. The filing system applied to the crates by Magog was also assiduously obscurantist. The Royal Archivists’ Battalion were one of the few units who still refused to use steam-driven military drudges: the enlisted men’s duties were too delicate, their officers insisted, to be performed by anything other than a human. Yet humans brought special problems of their own, and it was undeniable that the men worked and slept easier for not knowing when they were patrolling within feet of the crated remnants of a captured Chinese military satellite and its midget operators, or leaning for a quiet cigarette against a box containing the inurned ashes of a Romanian vampire-prince of bloody reputation.

The Vault was the holy of holies, the secret of secrets. It had levels of security all of its own: a second, even more stringent array of physiognometric devices was supplemented by graphological and electrolytic tests, and the single door was guarded at all times, inside and out, by six heavily-armed Archivists.

For all these reasons, if there had happened to be an all-seeing observer watching the Vault at half past ten o’clock on the night of the third of March, 199–, the said observer would not have been expecting there to be a figure, clearly not an Archivist, creeping surreptitiously between the aisles of crates and peering at their stencilled designations. A slight and furtive figure muffled in bulky black coveralls would have been, so our hypothetical spectator might have thought, a precise example of the kind of thing that there most certainly should not, on this occasion or any other, have been.

There was such a figure, however; although there was not any such spectator, apart perhaps from that ubiquitous, omniscient Observer who oversees us all.


[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005.]

I Can See Your Blog From Up Here

Ohh, this is exciting:



You can create your own visitor map here.

...I really should be working, shouldn't I.

Books Update: Shirtopener

During the last week or so I've mostly been reading telefantasy tie-in titles.

The Prisoner: The Original Scripts Volume 2, edited by Roger Fairclough, is just as fascinating as the first volume was. As there, Fairclough's editorial apparatus is a little erratic: it's sometimes difficult to tell where informed speculation ends and fannish wish-fulfilment takes over, for instance. Furthermore, in this volume Fairclough really goes to town with the script annotations, so that while reading Hammer into Anvil we are told among other things that "As filmed, Number 2 doesn't sit in his chair" or "As filmed, the Prisoner doesn't ask for adhesive tape" -- facts which are: a) fantastically trivial and b) easily observed by anybody in possession of the D.V.D.s (or even, like me, the ancient 1993 V.H.S. boxed set).

The scripts themselves, however, are just as absorbing as those in the first volume, with the genuinely substantial scripting changes, both subtle and huge, being fascinating to follow. It's really interesting seeing how It's Your Funeral originally incorporated a Manchurian Candidate brainwashing plot, for instance, or how the flirtation between the Prisoner and Number 86 in A Change of Mind was ruthlessly edited out by Patrick McGoohan. Even The Girl Who Was Death lost what would have been some gloriously funny and surreal sequences (including one where a gardener who has been spraying bushes with a canister marked "Insecticide" suddenly begins pursuing Number 6 with a canister marked "Homicide").

The most astonishing discovery in this volume, though, is that the original script for Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling -- the sorry runt of the seventeen-episode family, full of precisely the kind of melodramatic plot, clichéd sub-S.F. devices and over-reliance on obvious back-projection which were so prevalent in the spy series of the era, and which The Girl Who Was Death would mock so mercilessly just two episodes later -- is actually really good. Somehow this intelligent, subtle script, where a well-paced plot develops gradually through revealed clues and the more extreme elements emerge naturally through the action rather than being baldly stated upfront -- this quintessential Prisoner script, in fact -- was mangled during the production process until it became the drivelly mess that ended up on screen.

(For what it's worth, most of the changes made to the scripts in these volumes were largely McGoohan's responsibility, and are generally improvements, or at least not obviously detrimental. On the other hand, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling was edited and mostly produced in McGoohan's absence. Make of this what you will.)

Like its sister volume, this is well worth the substantial cover price. Highly recommended.

Less weightily, Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane isn't bad by TV tie-in fiction standards, and certainly better than most of the televised Torchwood stories. Lane has a good grasp on the regular characters (better than most of the scriptwriters, or indeed some of the actors) and a way of coming up with clever, intriguing images which illuminate them and their situations. His prose is smoothly functional, and his horror scenes are appropriately unpleasant.

Unfortunately the plot is formulaic and predictable, and based irritatingly on a very obvious and stupid fallacy. (Highlight whitespace to be spoiled: A parasite in the human gut, however alien, will not make the host appear to lose either weight or volume by eating all their food for them. Instead the hosts, containing as they do a massive, bloated parasite, will look like big, heavy starving people. This makes the idea of using said parasites as a diet tool utterly idiotic.)

It's an O.K. tie-in book, but not a patch on the adult Doctor Who novel ranges of the past... speaking of which, I'm currently re-reading for work-related reasons (writing work, obviously, not administration work) Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, which I haven't looked at for many years, and which really is fabulous. I'm also in the early stages of John Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade: The First Arabesk, which took a while to get into but which I'm now enjoying.

And that's this week's book news.

R.I.P. The Curse of Odin-Hotep

I don't think I mentioned, but the pseudonymous pulp-S.F. series novel I was talking about possibly writing a year and a quarter ago isn't going to happen now.

This is a shame, because I had a cast of thousands, including time-travelling Nazis, cyborg soldiers, eugenically enhanced Pharaohs, flying dragon-sphinxes and berserker warrior-mummies, poised to perform for your reading pleasure. Or at least the reading pleasure of the people who enjoy reading that sort of thing.

Never mind. Maybe I can salvage some of it for a future project.

Here (in pointedly purplish pulpy prose) is the beginning of what you missed out on:

At this height the wind is deafening, blinding: it shrieks past your ears, drying out your eyes. It buffets and bruises you as you hang in place, held there by lines of aetherial magnetism, counter-gravity. It is as well you have dressed warmly: at this altitude, the wind’s chill is intense.

Not so below. Beneath your feet, beneath the level of the birds and airships, the air across the ground is stagnant, warm and dense with smog. Exhausts from myriad flues vomit forth the steam and soot of burnt-out fuel, from coal or coke or oil or anything that, thousands of millennia ago, was once alive. From the tiniest micro-furnaces which fire the hand-held processing-engines of businessmen and bureaucrats, to the great belching chimneys of the automated factories and shipyards, every device in this great capital exhales smoke. It combines with the natural vapours of the slug-trail river whose floodplain this is, to create a foul, miasmic cloud.

Laid out above its gloom like veins on jaundiced skin, a spider-web of viaducts maps out the lines of the overhead railways. Between them the tallest of the city’s edifices emerge, the office-buildings and the slum-containment blocks. They burst forth accusingly from the murk to point at you, the spy, anchored by arcane science far above their precious city.

This is London. Or rather, that was what she was once. Now she is Londinium Maximum, Greatest London, the dark and cancerous heart of the global body that is Magna Britannia. The greatest empire and the most malignant tyrant the planet Earth, and now the solar system, have ever known.

From the suburban terraces of Slough and Windsor in the west to the commercial docks of Canvey in the east; from the slums of Dagenham and Dartford to the voluptuous townhouses of Mayfair; from drab St Albans in the north, and spreading down along the southern coastal railway-line as far as Horsham and Grinstead – London sprawls open to her visitors, balefully inviting.

Accepting, you descend.


[Pax Britannia series elements © Abaddon Press 2005 or thereabouts.]

Hmm. I'd been reading Perdido Street Station. Can you tell?

Verbiage

As you may have noticed, I haven't had time to get to this blog during the past week or so. That's probably going to continue for a little while, as I try rather manically to catch up with writing my novella for War Stories.

What with there having been Christmas last year and everything, this work has slipped back rather, so that I've had to impose a fairly rigorous writing schedule on myself to get it... well, started, to be honest. I'm pretty much entirely hopeless in matters of self-discipline, as anyone who saw me at mealtimes over Christmas can attest.

Being remarkably anally-retentive, I've broken my time down into all the days I'm free from work, then worked out how much of which chapter I can sensibly expect to write on each of them -- factoring in the necessary Surefish columns, a couple of possible one-off articles and a Beer Festival, all of which are coming up in the next few months.

Fortunately the fact of knowing that this expectation exists, even if only in my brain, has been sufficient so far to force me into actually doing the work, rather than arsing around on the internet, reading mailing lists, fiddling with Wikipedia and the like.

When I was an undergraduate I could write 4000-word essays overnight. Admittedly I didn't enjoy it much, which is why I left it to the last minute. And nobody was holding me to a publishable standard, and non-fiction is different anyway... but still, I envy my younger self that facility with language. Even when I was writing Of the City of the Saved... I often managed 2000 words in a day, and there were a couple when I was pushing 3000, but they were exceptional even then.

I can't imagine being able to work that fast now. The more fiction I write, the more pitfalls and difficulties I can see, the more care and attention I feel I have to put into each individual word, sentence and paragraph, and the longer it takes.

Admittedly, getting broadband probably hasn't helped either.

Over the past four days I've managed a respectable 6000 words, but it's been a killer. Most of the schedule demands 1000 to 1250 a day, which is more achievable but still a bit punishing.

All of which is a roundabout -- and, under the circumstances, an unnecessarily verbose -- way of saying that updates to this blog are going to be slowing down somewhat in the forseeable future. Before, of course, being reborn triumphant after my deadline.

I'll try to keep up the mini book reviews, but I'm behind on those already. Expect something, er, Wednesday possibly. If that's all right with everyone.

Cylon of Cyrene

Urgh. No time to post properly at the moment, for reasons I'd describe in detail if I had time to post properly at the moment.

I certainly haven't had time to write my column for Surefish about giant space mirrors. However, here's one I prepared earlier.

Flogging Jehovah

Is it wrong to be polite to Jehovah's Witnesses?

I answered the door to two of them -- a mother and son, I think -- in my dressing-gown this morning, in the hope that they might be delivering my Doctor Who: New Beginnings DVD boxed set. (They weren't, but it's a tactic they might want to consider in future.) They were a little nonplussed by my déshabille, but launched gamely into their spiel before I cut them off, politely, and told them, politely, that I wasn't really able to discuss the Lord Jesus with them right now.

The thing is, I'm not a particularly tolerant person, where intrusions into my privacy are concerned. I have no difficulty being rude to cold-callers who phone up trying to sell me double glazing or new kitchens: they took the job, they're being paid for it (badly, but that's a matter between them and their employer), and they knew full well that my being bloody rude to them was a risk they were accepting along with the position. Also, they're bastards.

I can't bring myself to take that attitude with J.W.s. I doubt my beliefs have more in common with theirs than perhaps a third of the Nicene Creed, I think they show some worryingly cultish tendencies and they most certainly get the christian community (of which they're fairly marginal members) a bad name. But still, I can't help looking at it from their point of view.

As far as they're concerned, their calling from door to door is a desperate attempt to save their neighbours from eternal damnation. Out of sheer charitable love for people who they've never met, and are very likely to tell them to fuck off, they brave rejection, insult and physical violence on a regular basis as a working-out of their faith. That faith isn't mine, and I can't see any way it ever could be. But if I was in their position, I very much doubt I'd have that degree of commitment or moral courage.

Oddly, this isn't a respect I extend to evangelical "missions", Alpha Course organisers, or people who stand in the street shouting through megaphones that I'm going to Hell. They can fuck off, with their bullying rhetoric, their unchallengeable certainties and their smug middle-class haircuts.

The J.W.s, though, I can't help respecting even while I think they're deluded fools.

So... should I continue to be polite to them, and to tell them (as I did today) that although I don't want to talk to them I do appreciate their kindness? Or should I tell them to fuck off, on the grounds that this will discourage them from intruding into people's lives, risking their own safety and bringing religious people (slightly further) into disrepute?

...Actually, I think I know the answer to that. In most cases it wouldn't discourage them at all -- it would just confirm them in their belief that the world is fundamentally corrupt and deaf to their preaching of the truth.

It's difficult to know how you can affect a mindset like that, short of engaging them in actual argument. And sadly that's something I haven't the time or energy -- or commitment, or moral courage -- to do.

A Time for Reflection

It seems the U.S. will shortly be unveiling its strategy to combat global warming (you know, just in case it turns out that it's actually happening after all), and it's:

Giant Space Mirrors!

That's my next Surefish column sorted, then.

Books Update: Demolishing Our Holmes

(Hmm. I think I may have used that one before. Never mind, it was a while ago now and I doubt anyone will notice.)

In accordance with this mini-resolution, here's a brief writeup of the latest book I've finished reading:

Erasing Sherlock by the remarkable Kelly Hale, is the fifth Faction Paradox novel: the story of a modern woman set loose, thanks to some dodgy pirated time-travel technology, in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The narrator -- an academic posing as a maid -- is a delight to read, a brilliant, utterly alive creation, while Holmes and Watson are more vibrant and textured than I can remember them being in any Conan Doyle story, whilst still being perfectly true to his conception. I rather prefer the first half of the book, which is essentially an intellectual-game-turned-romance between the narrator and Holmes on the latter's home turf, to the later chapters where both are having to improvise in unfamiliar territory.

The prose is gorgeous, rich and creamy, and the period detail is excellent, erudite but executed with a light touch. On the whole, a fantastic novel with some marvellous character work, an addictive story and a surprising amount of shagging. I've no hesitation in calling it the best -- just as, sadly, it's the last -- of Mad Norwegian's Faction Paradox range.

Not Chuffed

I can't say I approve of the recent protest by my fellow commuters in Bristol and Bath against First Great Western. Apart from anything else, making sure that your consumer action group gets as much publicity as possible on the very day it's breaking the law by using a publicly-funded service without paying for it, isn't a terribly impressive way of claiming the moral high ground.

Nonetheless, I am most displeased with F.G.W. For weeks now they've been saving money (and raising those all-important shareholder dividends) by running underequipped and overcrowded train services, charging commuters extortionate prices for the privilege of being crammed into carriages like cattle. (Albeit cattle in suits and ties, who instead of being taken to abbatoirs to be electrically stunned and slaughtered will be spending a day behind a desk in an office, staring at computer screens, mooing and chewing the cud in a perplexed kind of way.)

Yesterday my train to work was so crowded it couldn't physically fit me on board. People were standing all the way up the corridors of both carriages, crammed in around the doors and apparently in the toilet as well. (I didn't even know that the service in question had a toilet, but evidently no expense had been spared. Oh, wait.) Of the half-dozen people waiting at our little branch-line station, four managed to squeeze on board after some shoehorning by the guard, while I and one other were turned away. I had to take the bus to Bristol Temple Meads to get a later train, arrive at work an hour late and forego my lunch hour in order to catch up. Grr.

Petty law-breaking and catchily-named pressure groups aren't the way to go, however. Instead, I urge everbody in the South-West to participate fully in the spirit of the free-market philosophy espoused so fervently by this government and their marginally less liberal predecessors, by refusing to give another penny of your money to F.G.W., and instead granting your custom to one of the many comptetitors of theirs who run trains along the same routes.

...Oh, that's right. You can't, in fact, do either of those. Because while the Government passes out marketarian propaganda with one invisible hand, it's using the other to hand over functional monopolies to companies along with millions of pounds of public money, thus effortlessly combining the worst aspects of a state-run monopoly and a profit-driven private company.

That it then makes pathetic excuses for them, instead of enforcing basic standards of customer care, helps to ensure we don't for a moment mistake its sheer corrupt contempt for the public interest for anything so naïve and charming as incompetence.


[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are not endorsed by anyone other than me. Even the cats are looking dubious, actually. But honestly. T'ch.]

Scenes from a 21st-Century Life

LIVING ROOM. DAY.

[Enter Phil. B. is watching Holby City. On screen, the doctors have just performed a caesarian section.]

PHIL: Can I talk to you a sec?
B.: Just let me pause this.

[She pauses it. The screen is full of open torso and blood-smeared baby.]

PHIL: Erm. Preferably not while looking at that?
B.: Sure.

[She rewinds. The doctors put the baby back inside.]