Busy
My apologies for the lack of response to various comment posts; I've been busy - very busy - but all are appreciated. I'm now off to London to participate in the BSFA panel discussion on the current shortlist, alongside Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Adam Roberts. Normal service will resume shortly, when I should have some more to say about TERMINAL WORLD.

The wine of silence
Now Playing: Fripp and Eno

Some time ago I mentioned my exciting journey into the world of guitar lessons, something that, I'm pleased to say, is on-going and still proving enormously stimulating.

I'm never going to be anything other than a hobbyist guitar player, someone who enjoys making some vaguely tuneful noises in the privacy of their own bedroom - know your limitations, as they say. But I enjoy reading around the subject of guitar playing, and as a consequence - because I've been given a piece to study which involves detuning the lowest string from E to D - I started nosing around the internet to find out a bit more about this "tuning" lark. Inevitably, therefore, I came across the "new standard tuning" as devised and promoted by Robert Fripp and his students, and that led me to read some old Fripp interviews I found online.

I've always had an odd, vaguely adversarial relationship with Fripp's music. I've been listening to it in its various forms for more than twenty five years, yet I've never really had anything resembling a conventional emotional connection with it. It's more like mathematics, or physics. I suppose the analogy would be looking up at a cliff: it's huge and soaring, impressive in a bleakly magnificant way, but it's also kind of forbidding, with an attendant risk that chunks might break off at any moment. It's certainly in no way warm or consoling, in no way capable of cheering you up, but then I don't suppose that's remotely the point. What is true is that, of all the "prog rock" I listened to as a callow youth, much of which I'm still enormously fond of in a guilty pleasure sense, only the albums of King Crimson seem capable of holding my interest as strongly now as they did then. I listen to a lot of modern rock and pop, a lot of world, blues and classical, but it's a rare week that doesn't go by without "In the Wake of Poseidon" or "Starless and Bible Black" or "Red" getting a spin. This isn't music that it's easy to love, but it is fascinating and challenging, and I doubt that I'll tire of it any time soon. Even Kurt Cobain liked - hey - KC.

Fripp's music is known to many people who've never picked up a Crimso album, of course. It's all over Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super-Creeps, and Heroes wouldn't be the awesome thing it is without Fripp's "hairy rock guitar" running through it like a bright chrome thread. He's done amazing work with many other artists, not least Brian Eno. Their 1973 collaboration, "No Pussyfooting", has been unavailable for years, but it's recently been reissued on a 2CD set. It's pretty daunting music for the uninitiated, truth to tell - toe-tapping and hummable are not phrases that spring immediately to mind.

To put it into perspective, when the original album was broadcast on the John Peel show, it was accidentally played *backwards* due to a tape-threading error and no one - except Brian Eno, who tried to phone in to correct the error - spotted the mistake. Amusingly, the new release includes both main tracks (yeah, just the two - this is the early sevs, maaaan) in their backwards format, as well as one of the tracks played at half-speed, as if the original vinyl were being played at 16 and 2/3 speed, as was possible on some players. This struck a chord with me because I used to play the instrumental side of "Starless and Bible Black" at 45 rpm, to make it sound heavier and faster. (And pop pickers, the Cocteau Twins' Victorialand, which was one of the few albums meant to be played at 45 rpm, sounded like Bladerunner backing music when played at 33 rpm).

I digress. Anyway, one of those online Fripp interviews contained the following Fripp quote: "Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence." Which, when you think about it, is quite a conversation stopper. But the quote nagged at my memory - something about music and wine - and eventually I remembered why. "Music is the wine" is the first track on Seventeen Evergreen's album, which I mentioned in my year's end music round-up. A hitherto unsuspected Fripp connection? Yes, because "Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence" is *also* a Fripp quote, or so it would appear. The fact that these statements are mutually contradictory, but in some way both inarguably correct, is, I think, rather pleasing.

And we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Myers-Briggs
Now Playing: Mercury Rev's new album

While searching for stuff about myself on the internet (egomaniacal, moi?), I came across some kind of website/forum thing for people of the INTP (Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Perception) personality type. A thread was running in which the participants speculated as to which authors might fall into the same grouping, and my name was raised as a possible INTP (or "architect", in the Kiersey classification). According to the Wikipedia page, INTP types make up about 1 - 5 % of the population.

The interesting thing is, I've done the Myers-Brigg test twice, about a year apart, and on both occasions I was indeed classified as INTP - despite what seemed to me fairly conscious efforts to "cheat" the test on the second run. So, while I've no idea of the legitimacy of this kind of exercise, it did seem quite robust.

I wonder what is the most common Myers-Briggs type among my readers?

In other words, it's my birthday today. I'm taking the afternoon off and going out for a nice meal with my wife. Then it's back to the grindstone and the final push to the end of the new book.

The Big Sky
Now Playing: Kate Bush

As mentioned here, I went up to the Science Museum a couple of weeks ago to do a short piece for the BBC. While I was there I popped into the shop and treated myself to a gadget I'd been meaning to get hold of ever since reading about it in one of the astronomy magazines: a nifty little beast called a Celestron SkyScout. I nearly bought one in Chicago last year, but didn't fancy trying to get it through customs, given that it's about the cost of a mid-range digital camera and I'd already picked up a few other goodies.

I guess if you're plugged into astronomy, you'll know about these things (Meade market an equivalent product) but, without exception, everyone I've shown it to has reacted with a degree of surprise, in the sense that they genuinely didn't know that anything like this existed.

SkyScout is a thing about the size of digital video camera with built-in GPS. It's very light and runs off a couple of AAA batteries. You go outside at night, switch it on and wait until it acquires a GPS lock. You then point it at something in the sky - and this is the clever bit - it tells you what you're looking at, based on an internal database of stars, planets and other astronomical objects.

That bright star in the west? Venus. That less bright star over there? Castor. What's more, SkyScout will give you a brief audio narration for the brighter objects, and it also includes a display window where it can display scientific data, GPS stats, even your position. It can also be used to guide you to an object of your interest: simply select an item from the database, and the device will lead you across the sky until you're looking in the right direction.If you're up for it, it can even give a guided tour of "tonight's highlights".

It's pretty amazing, really - and it's only the tip of a GPS revolution in amateur astronomy. You can now buy a GoTo telescope that you can essentially set up in your back garden out of the box, switch on, and allow it to find its way around the sky.

Of course, there's an argument that all this shiny gadgetry takes away some of the fun of navigating around the sky, learning the constellations etc. But take it from me. I was a professional astronomer for more than a dozen years, and an occasional amateur for a quarter of a century, and I've never been particularly good at sky recognition. In fact, on the rare occasions when the skies are clear around here, the last thing I want to be doing is trying to figure out which star is which. I want to look at stuff, before the clouds roll in. I can do the recognition later, thanks. Anything that helps me get my telescope (or even my eyeballs) actually pointed at something interesting has to be a boon.

Anyway, I bought it for my wife. Not me. Just so that's clear.

 

Comments

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.

On RaceFail

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.

I am One
Now Playing: Smashing Pumpkins

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.

Non-PC

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.

Open for business

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.

 

Lux Interior - 1946 - 2009
Now Playing: The Cramps.

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.