Now Playing: Bruce
I really ought to update this thing more often, but the sad fact is that weeks and weeks go by with nothing of the slightest interest to report. Taking that as a theme, though, what's going on right now? Well, nothing much. I'm still beavering away on the new book, which is more or less the only thing dominating my plans for the next couple of months. I've reached that point where I can see the end of the tunnel, but at the same that glint of light is an awfully long way off and there's much work to be done before I get there. Nonetheless I am enjoying the process - it's great fun to be writing about life six million years in the future, where almost anything goes. This is a book which takes Clarke's famous dictum - any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic - as its fundamental credo. I know this will irritate some people, as I cheerfully toss in all manner of futuristic technology such as stasis fields and antigravity, without ever explaining how any of it works - but I hope at the same time that there's still a sense of things being governed by rules; it may be magic, but it's not all-powerful and there are costs. The characters, incidentally, may in some cases have what we would consider as godlike powers - the ability to move and destroy worlds, to rejuvenate stars and manipulate wormholes - but for the most part, although they are living in the deep, distant future, and have outlived countless cycles of human civilisations - they are people who were born near our own time (about a thousand years from now) and have carried the mental baggage of that era with them. They still like a good glass of wine, a nice sunset, human companionship. There are posthuman intelligences, downloaded minds, etc - but the main characters are resolutely flesh-and-blood, and far from immortal.
That's House of Suns, but what else has been cooking? I'm waiting to hear back on a couple of stories, but other than that it's been all-go on the novel. I don't have to write anything else until March of next year (when I have to hand in a novella) so I can afford to focus solely on the book until then. Editing and revision will undoubtedly last until Christmas, and probably spill over into the New Year, as it did with The Prefect.
What am I looking forward to? Next week I hope to catch the new Bourne film, which ought to be a treat. I don't think I've enjoyed many thrillers in recent years as much as the first two, and the reviews all suggest that the third installment is not likely to disappoint. Like all right-thinking people, I'm also anticipating new material from The Boss, whose new single is available for download courtesy of The Guardian. I like Springsteen very much - in fact, my admiration only seems to deepen with each new album. But it wasn't always thus. I had a couple of friends who were into him before he went nova in the mid-eighties with Born in the USA, but although I borrowed tapes and records, it just didn't click. The breakthrough for me was hearing "Meeting across the River" (from Born to Run) on some Radio 1 program - so sparse, so ominous. I just had to have that. Later I got into Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska, and never really looked back.
Springsteen's good even when he's throw-away. Lucky Town and Human Touch, the two albums he released back-to-back in 1992, were well received at the time but the reaction cooled as time went by - it was all loud and brash, all a bit too obvious. The perceived opinion was that Springsteen had nothing to sing about except being rich and famous, with a marriage on the rocks. But even a song like 57 Channels has a power to worm its way into your brain. I can't channel hop without hearing the Boss singing that one. 57 Channels and nothin' on. It's great, really it is.
For me, he's always been at his best stripped-down and intimate, on Nebraska and Tom Joad. I can't process Devils and Dust yet - it's too recent; ask me in ten years. Listening to Nebraska, all that stuff about refineries at night, radio relay stations, New Jersey turnpikes - I sometimes get the impression you could reconstruct almost the entirety of late-twenthieth century america from that record. It's in the grooves, stored holographically.
Which leads on, more or less, to Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels - an Americana-drenched tale of alternate realities waging war against each other, which I'm reading right now. It's very good indeed...