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I've turned off the comment verification thingy as it was causing problems for people. I don't remember purposefully switching it on, so it's no biggie. I've yet to delete a single comment, so provided we don't get spammed to hell, I can't see things changing.
I've just spent a week in Nice, which is something of a tradition around this time of year (my wife's from that part of the world, and it's no great hardship to spend a few days in the Cote D'Azur at the tail-end of a rainy British winter. Being a good writer type, of course, I was also busy plugging away on the end-stages of the new book. There are worst places to work than the swish lobby of a delightful French hotel. I was also trying to read the entire BSFA novel short list, in preparation for a panel discussion later this month).
I arrived home and checked my usual favorite websites, including Niall Harrison's excellent Torque Control, which - along with Locus online - is one of the two main places where I indulge my laughably inadequate efforts to keep up with goings-on in the SF "world". I don't read too many blogs (a handful of friends' sites, and that's about it). Hence, I've been almost entirely ignorant about the ongoing RaceFail discussion, and remained so until Torque Control's handy summary of the main issues and sequence of events. I say "almost entirely" because with the hindsight of the Torque Control summary, I realise that I had in fact read the Guardian blog entry linked therein, without in any way grasping quite how incendiary it had/was about to become.
Any attempt by me to encapsulate events is going to be crassly simplistic, and in any case, I've only skimmed the surface of the various summaries floating around there. The gist of it is (I think) that a basically well-intentioned discussion on race in SF (not just the deficit of non-white characters, but the hostility or otherwise of the professional institution of SF to non-white readers and writers), went nuclear. Regrettable things appear to have been done by protagonists on the professional, as opposed to fan, side of the equation. None of the key players are individuals that I would consider to be anything more than distant professional acquaintances (most of them I haven't met or communicated with in any fashion), so I suppose it's relatively easy for me to take a stand; my professional career isn't tangled up in this. I don't think anyone involved in this is an idiot (far from it), so I hope bridges can be rebuilt, fences mended etc.
That's by the by, though. What's more interesting to me right now is how this whole discussion pertains to the kind of work I and my colleagues, most but not all of whom happen to be white and male, produce.
I confess I've not, as a whole, given a massive amount of thought to unconscious racism in my fiction. I've tried to be on guard against sexism, and I like to think that, in my way, I've made some efforts to populate my books with female characters who aren't all cut from the same male fantasy templates. (That's not to say I've always succeeded: Ilia Volyova, to a degree of worried bemusement on my side, has become something of a gun-totin' favorite among many of my male readers, despite my insistence that I always visualised her as a world-weary Judi Dench, rather than a pneumatic Angelina Jolie. Clearly she came over as more Lara Croft than I intended, which is evidence of nothing more than a writer failing to communicate their vision.)
I cannot, in all honesty, say that I've given anything like the same degree of attention to non-white characters. I always saw the characters in the Revelation Space universe as ethnically complex, something I tried to signify with the mish-mash French/Chinese naming system. I didn't really see any of them as black or white - just weird, primarily (I think I was mainly thinking about hairstyles). Then I did CENTURY RAIN, and at the time of writing it was absolutely clear to me that Custine, Floyd's sidekick and fellow jazzman, was going to be black. By the time I finished the book, however, it didn't really seem plausible that Custine could have been both black and a former high-ranking policeman in an alternate, somewhat more facist than our own, version of the nineteen fifties. So I simply deleted any of the indicators that might have given a clue as to Custine's skin colour, which were in any case few and far between.
Cop-out or necessary change due to plot demands? You decide.
I can't say that plotting had much impact on the portrayal of Tom Dreyfus in THE PREFECT. Dreyfus was always black (or non-white) in my mind, as he remains now. This isn't because I had some deep-seated desire to write about a black security operative in the twenty fifth century. My writing methods are a lot more haphazard than that; almost embarrassingly so. But hey, since we're all being candid:
There was a point early on in the writing of the book when I hadn't yet got Dreyfus entirely fixed in my mind's eye. I felt that he was possibly a little overweight, possibly a little careworn, possibly a man that it would be easy to underestimate - not Jack Bauer, so to speak. Then I happened to watch the film Phone Booth, and I was struck by Forest Whitaker's performance as the police captain in that film. He's a little sleepy-looking, has that lazy eye, but he comes through, and it's only his vigilance that saves the day. It wasn't suddenly a case that Dreyfus "became" Forest Whitaker in my head, but the character did snap rather effectively into focus, and Whitaker's performance was undoubtedly the catalyst for that. But at no point did I feel it necessary to insert any references to Dreyfus's skin colour. How would I have done that, anyway? I'm not sure. Maybe if I'd given him a different name, something that tipped off the reader as to his possible ancestry - something African, possibly.
"Something African" leads into another aspect of the portrayal of race in SF which I'm going to have to give some serious thought to in coming months. For quite some time now I've been germinating thoughts about a big new hard SF trilogy, something I'm calling the 11K sequence, because it's going to span (more or less) the next 11,000 years. It's going to be about space exploration and colonisation, done properly - no messing about with magic near-light spacedrives here. Inspired by Paul McAuley's recent THE QUIET WAR, I want to grab the bull by the horns and make a virtue of all the recent data that's been coming on in on our own solar system and the growing family of extrasolar planets.
I digress. The reason I mention the 11K sequence is that, along with my thoughts about the structure and themes of the sequence, I was also minded to give it a subtle African bias, positing the emergence of Africa as a spacefaring, technological super-state several centuries down the line. We've had North American dominated futures, after all, as well as Chinese, Japanese and South-American ones - so why not "do" Africa? It's not, I hope, quite as blatantly cynical as it sounds: over the last few months I've found myself fascinated and enthralled with African music, and to a large extent that's where my African focus is coming from - music, as it usually is with me. But there's a deeper issue there, I think, and I doubt that I'd have given it much thought were it not for RaceFail. What right do I, a white, middle class welshman, have to write about Africa - even if it is Africa several hundred years from now? Would that shade into cultural appropriation? Or should I just go for it and try not to fuck it up too badly?
If nothing else, the RaceFail discussion has got me thinking about this kind of issue, and I don't suppose that's necessarily a bad thing.
Blink and you missed it, but I popped up briefly on last night's One Show (BBC1, 7.00 pm), talking about gadgets in SF. If you live in the UK you can watch it again on the BBC's iplayer - it's about half way in, I think. Really, we're only talking about 30 seconds or so here - but it was fun to do.
I've only heard from two people in connection with the PC editions of Six Directions, suggesting that the problem isn't enormous.
In the meantime I'm just a tad behind on correspondence (deadline hell) but I'm getting there slowly. I've seen a rough of the cover art for TERMINAL WORLD and it's fantastic. Or, as we people from Barry say, tidy.
Further to some of the comments in the last but one topic, it appears that a number of signed PC copies of The Six Directions of Space have slipped through the net (it seems to be the distributor's error) when in fact only signed and numbered editions should have been available.
If you are the recipient of one of these titles, drop me a line via the dendrocopus address (see below), and I'll put you in touch with Subterranean Press, who are keen to sort things out. I'll be out of touch until the weekend, however, so don't expect an immediate response.
Just a reminder - or a head's up for anyone who didn't see the note on the website - but for the last couple of months it's been possible to email me privately. This is working out pretty well; I'm typically no more than a few days behind with responses, and usually get them out somewhat faster than that. The new account, which I created specifically for this purpose, is dendrocopus followed by that squiggly symbol that rhymes with "cat", followed by yahoo.co.uk.
I can't, as ever, guarantee a response, but I'll do my best.
First John Martyn, now Lux. It's not shaping up to be a good year...
I saw the Cramps once only, in Rotterdam (I recall) sometime around 1992. I went with a friend and ESA colleague, Dr Arvind Parmar. We were collaborating on some astrophysics papers when we discovered (I think to our mutual surprise) that we both had an interest in noisy punk rock. The Cramps were great. I've stil got the T-shirt. I never really felt the need to listen to one of their albums all the way through, but the mere existence of Lux, Poison Ivy et al was a thing of joy.
Time I bigged-up "The Six Directions of Space", which is now available as a very handsome 88 page chapbook from Subterranean Press. I wrote this novella for Gardner Dozois' "Galactic Empires" anthology a year or two ago and Subterranean's Bill Shafer kindly approached me to reprint it as a standalone book. The book is set in about 2200AD, but the catch is it's a 2200AD in which Genghis Khan's Mongol empire has been running the planet for a thousand years. Yellow Dog, a government spy, is sent to investigate anomalies on the edge of the galactic transit system the Mongols have been using to colonise space. Publishers Weekly said "Reynolds (The Prefect) is a master of fitting large-scale space opera into just a few pages, and this novella is no exception."
I've been fascinated by Genghis Khan for quite a while, and in fact wrote an alternate history story about the Mongols about a decade ago. Interzone rejected it (rightly so, it was rubbish) and while very little of that story made it into "Six Directions... at least the research paid off. My wife, meanwhile, has travelled by horseback in Outer Mongolia and came back with some wonderful photographs and stories. Together with our friends from the same trip we've become fans of Mongolian cinema, which is to say that I've now seen three Mongolian films. I also own a couple of CDs of Mongolian throat singing, which is two more than I ever expected to.
So there you go - we take this stuff seriously, you know.
While I'm on the subject, and I really should have mentioned this sooner, you can also hear an audio version of "Thousandth Night" on the Subterranean website. Go to Subterranean online and click on the Fall 2008 issue.
www.subterraneanpress.com
Meanwhile, it's deadline hell for me for the next five weeks, so entries here will be decidely sporadic. No change there then...
Wow, what happened to 2008? Well, it's over now so onward and upward to 2009. I'd like to wish everyone the best of times in the coming year, with lots of good reading, good music and good health.
I suppose 2008 was an averagely good year for me, at least in terms of writing. I got everything done that I'd committed to, but the year got off to a less than spectacular start when I ended up taking much, much more time on a story commission than I'd ever expected to. As a consequence I was later going into Book 9 than I'd planned, and so far from finishing that book ahead of Christmas, here I am still working on it, with a deadline rushing towards me like a demented freight train.
Them's the breaks, though: writing is a creative process, and if you could predict in advance exactly how much time a given piece was going to take, exactly how problematic or challenging it was going to be, there wouldn't be a lot of room for surprises during the writing ... and what would be the point of that? The akward story, "Troika", will appear in Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming Science Fiction Book Club anthology Godlike Machine, and I'm pleased with it now. Actually "Troika" wasn't really the problem; the problem was the blind-alley I went down with a completely different story before I started writing the one I eventually finished. Knowing me, that blind-alley won't be entirely wasted; very little doesn't end up being used eventually.
Then the new book turned out to be a lot harder to get started on than I'd bargained for. I had the "big idea", such as it is, very early on in the game. I then spent months - really, months - bashing my ahead against the big idea, trying to find a way into it so I could actually tell a story. It wasn't until a good way into the summer that I found the opening, and even then my problems weren't over. In hindsight it was always going to be a hard book, since I was consciously avoiding so much of the stuff that I think I'm associated with. Even going into a standalone like HOUSE OF SUNS, there were a certain amount of space operatic "riffs" I could fall back on even on a bad day, but that didn't apply to the new one. The only thing in my experience remotely like it had been writing the Paris scenes in CENTURY RAIN, and while TERMINAL WORLD is a very different book, the opening chapters do have (I hope) something of the same rain-streaked noir vibe that I was aiming for in CR. But then it all goes off in a very different direction indeed.
Quite unexpectedly, I also found myself writing "Fury" (another story resurrected from a problem child), again for Jonathan Strahan (he's a good bloke, and definitely one of the most energetic editors out there right now) and taking a couple of weeks off the book to do so. I also wrote "Cardiff Afterlife", a short story for The Big Issue, but once that was out of the way there was to be no more short fiction for me this year. With the exception of a couple of short non-fiction pieces, I've done nothing but work on the book since the early summer.
2009 promises more of the same, but that's not really a problem; I'd far rather be busy than lolling around with nothing to do. Once I hand the new book in, I have a few short story commissions to deal with, and then I'll really have to make a start on the new book. What's it going to be? I don't know yet, although for once it's not because I don't have a clue, but because timing and contractual issues may mean I start one book as opposed to another. Then there are conventions - I'm doing Finncon in the summer, which should be great, and if I can get my act together I'll also attend Eastercon. And before very long 2010 will be looming on the horizon, which if anything promises to be even busier.
2010, eh? Doesn't that send a shiver down your spine? Well, it probably doesn't if you're under 30. But for those of us old enough to have gone to the cinema in 1984 - back when 2010 really did seem like the medium-term future - it does have a certain iconic resonance...
It was a good year for record purchases, I think. Album of the year? I'm torn: the album that's stayed with me with the longest, revealing new layers with each listen, is Radiohead's In Rainbows. Yes, it was released digitally in 2007, but I don't think it was possible to buy a physical copy until the start of this year. Anyway, after being slightly underwhelmed by Hail to the Thief, slightly encouraged by Thom Yorke's The Eraser, this did the business as far as I'm concerned. The only downside is that - since I seemed to have this on my MP3 for most of the year - it's inevitably come to be associated with grindingly tedious sessions on the treadmill. But still a fine album from a band that most certainly aren't resting on their laurels.
Purchased about half way through the year, the eponymous album by Mudcrutch - basically one of Tom Petty's bands before he formed the Heartbreakers - was seldom out of the car; it's a great driving album and drenched in authentic southern Americana. The album isn't an archival release; it was recorded recently, but done more or less live, and it makes you wish more records were done that way.
I picked up some good indie stuff this year. The Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible" came out in 2007, but I didn't catch up with it until almost a year after release. I had to be won over, but it eventually ended up impressing me enormously. In a similar vein, I also enjoyed another Canadian art-rock collective: Stars, with their second album "In our bedroom after the war". Wordy, intricate stuff, but efinitely worth the effort. Another record that hit the right spot for me was Seventeen Evergreen's "Life Embarrasses me on planet earth", which I admit I bought largely because of a Granddaddy comparison in one of the music mags, and, frankly, the title.
I didn't buy a great deal of British music this year, but I made exceptions for the Kaiser Chiefs, whose third album was a brilliant collection of concise, hook-laden pop songs with wit and pathos. It seemed to get a bit of a lukewarm reaction, but I loved it. At the other end of the cheerful/morose scale were Leeds band iLiKETRAiNS, who put out an excellent ep last year and followed it up with an album of almost superhuman bleakness, "Elegies to lessons learnt". With their focus on historical tragedies and failures, they're like a gloomier, slower version of British Sea Power. Anyway, how can you not swoon over a band with a song called The Beeching Report?
I've never listened to much metal, apart from the occasional dabbling with a Tool album or two, but I've got time for Metallica, and their new album was a juggernaut; the only CD that displaced Mudcrutch as essential in-car listening. I also enjoyed AC/DC's new one - but then, who didn't? It was essence of rock, and all the better for it - but not without its subtleties.
Rather late in the year, I also picked up some amazing albums from Malian musicians, including the entrancing "Welcome to Mali" by Amadou and Mariam, the "blind couple from Mali". Probably too soon to tell whether or not I'll be listening to it in a year's time, but I rather suspect I will.
That's it - lots of good stuff I've completely forgotten about, I don't doubt. But there was certainly more than enough good music to make 2008 a particularly enjoyable year...
At least in terms of the quantity of books read, this hasn't been a bad year for me, as they go. That's not to say I've read stacks of books, or that many of them were actually published in 2008 - but I certainly read a lot more than in recent years.
Book of the year for me remains Dan Simmons' THE TERROR, which has barely relinquished its grasp on my imagination as the months have passed. Utterly unclassifiable, as well - but without doubt one of the finest pieces of sustained suspense I've ever encountered.
Also with a supernatural edge, I enjoyed Joe Hill's HEART-SHAPED BOX, with minor reservations - I felt he brought the ghost on stage as a visible presence far too soon, and the extended chase that constituted the rest of the book did at times feel like a strangely graphic and depressing episode of Scooby-Doo (complete with ghost dogs and goth-rock soundtrack). But the book worked so well on its own terms, as a page-turning roadtrip horror novel, that I found the flaws easy to forgive.
I loved Michael Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION, even if it didn't function particularly well as a detective story. But there was so much else to chew on - the language, the humour, the acute sense of place - that it hardly mattered.
Operating in not dissimilar territory, CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL by Glen David Gold (which came out in 2001) is a fascinating lope through two equally fascinating worlds: the lost art of the stage magician, and the twentieth century on the cusp of television. It's hugely witty and clever.
The best pure SF novel I read in 2008 was Paul McAuley's THE QUIET WAR, a solar-system based hard SF novel which did everything right by me. I'm looking forward to seeing where Paul goes with the sequel.
The best crime novel I read was George Pelecanos's HELL TO PAY. I didn't read much crime this year, though. I'm ambivalent about SHUTTER ISLAND by Dennis Lehane; still trying to process that one, along with its switchback plot twists.
I only read one collection, and that was so that I might provide a foreword, but that doesn't stop me recommending Chris Beckett's THE TURING TEST - it's an excellent introduction to his work.
I read a lot of non-fiction, as always, but by far the most memorable - if not necessarily the most comprehensible - was Mark E Smith's rambling but mesmerising RENEGADE - indispensable if, like me, you're a bit of a Fall fan.
I'll be back with my music recommendations...
