Let’s Glorify Violence

I recently went to see Michael Winterbottom's new movie The Killer Inside Me, which has been the subject of much controversy because of its graphic scenes of violence towards women.  It's based on the noir novel by Jim Thompson; and many have attacked it as being misogynistic and excessively violent.  Others have defended it on artistic grounds, while conceding its violence makes it 'troubling'.  And there are some who have defended the film, on the grounds that it shows the brutal reality of domestic violence.   Which means it's a healthy corrective to all those Hollywood movies which routinely glorify violence.

I admire Winterbottom as a film-maker - his Twenty Four Hour Party People is a masterpiece - and I love noir in general, and the books of Jim Thompson in particular. To be honest though I found the film a bit of a yawn; BECAUSE IT WASN'T NEARLY VIOLENT ENOUGH.

I am in fact staggered at some of the reviewers who felt it was the most shocking thing they'd ever seen in the cinema.  There's a scene where Casey Affleck bashes up Jennifer Alba; and there's a second assault scene; and that's about it really.  Compared to what you get in many thrillers and action movies and horror flicks, it's very mild stuff. 

What IS weird however about both 'beating up women' scenes is that the women don't fight back - which makes the violence feel oddly detached, and not-credible; and hence makes it hard to care about the story and its characters. 

I think there's real merit in the argument that Winterbottom has created cliched female characters who don't respond in the way that real people would.  There's a hint that Alba's character in a masochist; but if so, that should be dramatised.  She should BEG to be beaten, which would truly shock us; and I would strongly argue that there's nothing inherently misogynistic about showing masochism  in a woman. Because  masochists DO exist.  I was once the fly on a wall in a Metropolitan Police investigation into a group of masochists who did the most appalling things - one chap hammered a nail through his own penis - and no one can deny it's a real psychological phenomenon. (What would be unacceptable, however, is to hint at the lie that ALL women like to be hurt - that gets you into the immoral/indefensible territory).

I think the real issue for me here is that Winterbottom is a cerebral arthouse director who hasn't mastered the basic concept that violence in cinema is there to be ENJOYED.  We love to be scared, appalled, terrified; we enjoy getting inside the head of evil serial killers; we relish being pursued by a psycho who has killed all our friends.  That's how violence works in genre cinema, and even in 'serious' cinema.  The violence in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall gives energy and adrenalin to this brilliant study of the last days of Hitler.  The violence in The Godfather - not your common or garden gangster flick but a true masterpiece about organised crime - is deliciously awful.  Luca Brasi having a knife in the hand before being garrotted! James Caan being plugged full of holes!

The horrible cop getting his head shot apart by Michael Corleone! 

These acts of violence function as essential elements of the overall pleasure that cinema  offers. And it's not just Hollywood movies which allow us to "enjoy' violence. One of my favourite films of last year was the verite arthouse movie A Prophet by Jacques Audiard, an unflinching study of life in a French prison. Except it's not really a 'study' or an 'analysis'; it's a movie, and a gripping one, with savourable sequences of ghastly violence that keep you glued to the seat. In particular, the murder committed in the first third of the film is one of the most compellingly enjoyable pieces of cinema I've ever seen; it doesn't 'glorify' violence, but boy, it's fun to watch.

What I'm saying is; let's stop pretending.  Of course violence, when it's in fiction rather than in life, is fun.  It's part of the imaginative experience; imagination is our way of living other lives, and since we can do so without incurring actual injury, the more violent the better.  It's cathartic, it's exhilarating, it can be beautiful; but the key point is; IF YOU'RE A SANE AND MORAL PERSON, WATCHING VIOLENT MOVIES DOESN'T MAKE YOU VIOLENT.  Reality, fiction; fiction, reality: two different things. 

And, as a writer of action SF, I have to concede that violence is my business. I write violence, I read violent books by other authors; I spend large parts of my day wondering whether a character should die by having his head blown up, or whether it would be more fun to have him eat a live snake and be consumed from the inside out. 

Adam Roberts, in his masterly and very funny novel Yellow Blue Tibia, explains how the science fiction writer approaches the art of violence, as a group of Russian SF authors (including the first person narrator) plot a story of alien invasion:

'Let's have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine, ' [said Frenkel], 'That would be the best option.

How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually?  This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one....Writers, you see,  daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in that respect.  A realist writer might break his character's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be  more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying.  He will do this every working day through his life.  How can this not produce calluses on the those tenderest portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?

Adam is bang on here; science fiction writers, and their close allies,  fantasy writers, are truly evil creatures. We are the people who cannot bear to write crime novels about serial killers because the body count is so darned low.  We celebrate the intellectual and extrapolative essence of our genre whilst shamelessly wallowing in atrocity and horrific acts of barbarity, evisceration, beheading, and worse.

Here's a sample of some of the stuff I've been reading recently:

Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal lift packs.  The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arch of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.

He came in with a pulse-blade, ghettho style. I let it chew at my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid end of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the other three worrying Johnny.

(from Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons)

There were heads and arms and legs and halves of bodies writhing and squirming and cursing under foot, and headless bodies dashing about the room colliding with friend and foe indiscriminately.  If ever there was a shambles it was there in the great council chamber of the seven jeds of Morbus.

(from Synthetic Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs)

I launched myself into the one I'd decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right.  He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back.  As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side.

(from The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers)

Hell, I read this stuff all the time, and what I write is often WORSE in terms of gruesome barbarity. (Red Claw got a great review from a site called Emotionally Fourteen, which then graded it 10 out of 10 for Number of Eviscerations- and I'm  actually proud of this.)  So does that mean I have calluses on the tenderest parts of my mind, the bits that are used to focus empathy, as Adam so beautifully if cruelly phrases it?

Well perhaps so.  But on balance I feel that constantly wallowing in imaginative violence has made me not one whit more aggressive, or capable of violence. I remain as timid, fearful, and cowardly as I have  always been.  I would happily slay a Barsoomian plant man with my long sword; but I am not in the habit of mugging elderly ladies, or randomly shooting people in pubs.

This is why I get very wary when kind-minded commentators praise a film like The Killer Within Me because it shows the 'reality' of violence.  It does nothing of the sort!  It's just a movie.  Real violence is what happens in the real world, and I abhor it; and I don't need films to tell me it's undesirable.  (That doesn't mean fictional stories should be immoral;  the art of writing violent fiction is being able to shock the audience with gory stuff without losing track of the real moral values we, the authors,  believe in.) 

But why, I am forced to ask, does violence in fiction appeal so strongly, to me and to so many of you?  Why do we not daydream about peaceful characters, who broker peace and leave a trail of concord and amity behind them? Why do we prefer the Man with No Name, or Conan, who are more inclined to leave a trail of corpses behind them?

I guess the answer is obvious; we're never more alive than when we are in fear of dying.  And to experience that intensity of life while reading a book, or watching a film, and without any ACTUAL possibility of dying, is vicarious ecstasy. 

So I will continue to read books and watch films that glorify and revel in violence; I will splash in blood and gore as my protagonist hews a path through his or her enemies with a broadsword, or a plasma gun; and I'll continue to treat senseless murder as a staple element of my daily entertainment. 

And let's not forget, violence can be wonderfully beautiful - WHEN IT'S NOT REAL.  Tarantino shows this in his magnificent Kill Bill, a glorification of violence in all its forms and traditions. So I'll end with some images from that, one of my favourite violent movies ever.

I’m Still Here!

Apologies for the lack of blogging recently - too many deadlines! I'll start posting regularly again soon, and I've got an amazing batch of SFF Songs of the Week to unleash - including choices from Richard Morgan and Jennifer Rardin.

In the meantime, I wanted to add a few small comments to the debate about Orbit's digital short story publishing initiative. I met Tim Holman, Orbit's publisher, last night, and we talked about it a good while. And this is a sceptical if not downright hostile post about it from John Scalzi, with many comments, including some from Tim.

The daftest comment/question is: have Orbit thought about [X,Y, Z]?  Well of course they have; whatever your views on this venture, this particular publisher does not rush headlong into things.

I regard the initiative as a wholly good thing.  It's a clever innovation that creatively liberates published Orbit authors - allows us to stretch our wings by giving us guaranteed publication of our short stories. If I had more time, I might self-publish on Kindle; but hey, producing a movie is enough of a headache!

But the key principle is: I do actually make a large chunk of my yearly income from Orbit's advances for my novels, as do all their authors.  So a bit of gratis work is no big deal - in the expectation of getting paid IF the story is popular.  If no one reads it, well, fair enough; I had the fun of writing it and that's enough. 

For me it's a creative challenge - an opportunity to really get to engage with the modern possibilities of the short story format without the irksome horror of having to send stories off and not knowing if they'll be rejected. Some stories might go viral; has that ever happened yet?  Or only to stories published free on websites?

It's fair to ask questions of Orbit; but trust me, I've worked for crooked evil corporations in the past, and will do again; Orbit just ain't that.  Theirs is a genuine attempt to try something new; to create a market that wasn't there before. 

Anyway, let's see how it develops; and I'm aiming to test it out myself by drafting a few short stories over the coming months, once I've delivered the various things I'm writing. (More info soon - once I've done the darned work!)

PS I once hid a short story on this website; no one ever found it. Ha! What a pathetic bit of self-publishing, eh?

Five Best Space Operas

SF Signal have just done a Mind Meld on the fascinating subject of Space Opera...with contributions from Paul McCauley, Mike Cobley, Allen Steele, Peter F. Hamilton, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, authors at the Book View Cafe, and myself.

Check it out here.

Who’d Want to be More than Human?

If you could have a superpower, which superpower would it be?

Oh please! Don't pretend you've never thought about this.  It's the first daydream of every card-carrying SFF fan. The entire genre depends on wish-fulfillments fantasies...we all grow up dreaming of being a superhero of some kind or another.

(Or, if comics aren't your thing, then you may have dreamed of being a warrior, or a beautiful kick-ass princess, or a daring space captain,  or a vampire, or a werewolf....tick box as appropriate...)

I always wanted to be this guy (NOT THE WEEDY SWOT, THE BIG MACHO ONE!):

In retrospect, this is embarrassing.  It would have been cooler to want to be Spider-Man. He might have icky-sticky webbing - hello, sexual metaphor alert! - but at least he doesn't become hugely engorged and large and green, i.e. (using the celebrated Palmer metaphor translation device) Angry Hulk =  monstrous erection the colour of a frog. 

When I was older, and knew better, I wanted to be this guy:

Wolverine of course has a variety of powers; strength, feral rage, a healing factor, and an adamantium skeleton. But his main superpower is that he is cool.  He is Indiana Jones with added attitude; he is the ultimate bad-ass.  He even smokes cigars (cigars make me cough, and I hate the smell they leave on your clothes - but this is a daydream, right?)

I have never, however, daydreamed of having this guy's superpower:

Stretchy limbs, a stick  up his arse, and grey hair blooming at his temples? What's the fun of that?

Even Johnny Storm's power was dorky; Flame on!  It's somehow so juvenile.  I'd much rather be the Beast - especially when he had the coloured fur.

But most of all, I wanted the full package; the super-power, and the inner torment.  The Hulk is not a happy superhero; he's tortured, hated, mocked by society.  Peter Parker is insecure.  Wolverine has a dark back story (revealed over a billion comic stories, and rather oddly synopsised in the movie X Men Origins: Wolverine.)  The key common factor - for the adolescent me, daydreaming of being a superhero - was the notion of being a loner, an outsider, 'not understood, 'special'. 

The essence of being a teenager dreaming of having a superpower, in other words, is to feel just like you do when you DON'T have a superpower. 

In one of my favourite ever SF novels, however, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, the characters have a rather different superpower.  Six characters who separately are confused and unhappy creatures are able to join together to form a new kind of entity  - a homo gestalt.  Lone - the Idiot as he's known in the early chapters - is the first person who is able to make the gestalt 'blesh';  but it brings him little happiness.  Bonnie and Beanie are two twins who can teleport but cannot speak; Baby, another member of the gestalt, is a mongoloid baby with the mind of a computer. 

It's a masterly book, in my view; one of the greatest SF novels ever. But it's not the stuff of which daydreams are made. Here's the first paragraph:

The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.  His clothes were old and many-windowed.  Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.

Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them.

Lone has a superpower - telepathy - but more than that, he is a vital piece in a new kind of human species, a gestalt entity that is larger than the sum of its (human) parts. But who would want to be this sad lonely freak!  It's  a dystopian vision; the superpower as curse, not blessing.

The recent Brit TV show Misfits also, darkly but hilariously, created a gang of superheroes who are cursed not blessed. Simon has the power of invisibility; but since he's such an annoying dork he was pretty much invisible anyway.  Sexy, charismatic  Alisha  is cursed with the power to make men desire her when she touches them; which means she's constantly subject to attempted rapes, and can only make love to her boyfriend though mutual, non-touching, masturbation.  And Kelly, the chav (for US readers - chavs are way lower down the social scale than trailer trash), is telepathic; which means she spends all her time hearing people think, 'God what a slag SHE is.'

Wolverine is cursed too of course - but I would LIKE to be cursed the way he is.  I'd love to be haunted, lonely, an outcast from society, but still able to kick-ass and lord it over my enemies. 

The Sturgeon vision, however - and the Misfits vision too - makes us experience what it would be like to have special powers that don't make you feel special.  You' d be better off being ordinary, than having THESE crap powers.

It's the difference, of course, between wish-fulfillment genre stories and darker, more satirical explorations of the same subject matter. But it makes me aware of how very hard it would be to be 'more than human'.  Because it's our human frailties - our insecurity, our vanity, our ego, our petty jealousy of others - that makes us want to be superpowered in the first place.  If we really did evolve, to become better, wiser, more profound people - then Marvel Comics would go out of  business, and superheroes would go out of vogue.

This for me is one of the problems with Series 3  of Heroes, which I am watching at the moment (long after everyone else of course - Always The Last One To Catch On to a Cultural Phenomenon truly is my superpower.)  Because - without giving away actual plot details - I would say that one of the story conceits in this series is the idea that ANYONE can have a superpower. And in surprise twist after surprise twist, characters change powers, lose powers, and acquire powers when it was their role to be the character WITHOUT a power. All of this undermines the series' original genius, its ability to create superheroes with original character traits. In the early eps, for instance,  Peter Petrelli, for instance, was gifted with the power of being able to see in 3 D despite having an annoying lock of hair dangling in front of one eye; and his brother Nathan was gifted with the power of looking like he had his elegantly cut suits sprayed on every morning. 

But once characters lose their traits, and change their powers - it's hard to root any more.  Because 'rooting' is at the very heart of this 'which superpower would you like to have?' game.  You define yourself by the character with whom you most empathise.  It works for Marvel Comics characters; it works equally well with Buffy characters. Are you Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Angel, or Xander? (I'm Giles - the annoying swotty one who never hits anyone. I'd like to be Xander, but in my heart I know I'm not good looking enough!)  But of course, in my dreams, I'm Buffy. (This is fantasy, changing sex is allowed...) 

So let me answer my own opening question. 

If I could be a Misfits character I'd be - well I wouldn't be any of them actually. AARGH. Nightmare. I guess Curtis is the coolest, but his ability to turn back time would make life SO complicated.  It's hard enough to keep track of just the ONE life...

If I could have the powers of any character in the series Heroes, it would have to be Hiro. 

Not because he looks like me (I'm much closer to Peter Petrelli Parkman) but because stopping time is so cool.  Life rushes past so fast - wouldn't it be great just to freeze it, and take a proper look!  (Time-travelling is less appealing to me, since, as with Curtis's powers, it results in stories so complex they make my head hurt.) But Clare Bennet's powers are also great - because they're so limited! She has a healing gift, she can't die, but has no superstrength and so has to use a gun or a taser against bad guys. And the sheer FRUSTRATION of that puts me in that character's head, and makes me feel her inner torment. (The characters who can replicate other people's powers, however, are TOO powerful.  There's nothing 'feel-special' about that power; they're all armour, no chink.)   

And if I had to be a character in More than Human, I would be Lone.   Even though he's a character who has no character; but I feel for his loneliness. I empathise with that.  It's not wish-fulfillment - it's connection.  I connect with Lone, the superhero who never defeats a supervillain, and lives and dies in sadness. (Damn, that sounds awful - honestly I don't spend ALL my time in front of a computer - I really do have a BIT of a life...)

But all in all, I would rather be the Hulk.  Because the Hulk's power is an inability to control rage within acceptable boundaries; and that's exactly what I would love to do when I'm stuck on a country lane and the other car won't back up an inch or so to the nearest passing place, and I have to reverse back half  a mile.  Or when I get stuck on hold calling the telephone company, and they play that annoying music. Or when...

You get the idea. There are moments when Hulk Rage would be nice.

Palmer....Kill!

Well, maybe not; maybe gentle snarky irony will always be my one and only superpower.

How to Write Action SF

What's the best way to kill an alien? Do you zap it with energy beams, blast it with bullets, burn it with a flame-thrower, drop an anti-matter bomb on it, or challenge it to a mano a alien duel?

Welcome to my world; these are the kind of difficult questions which occupy a large part of my professional life.

Shooting an alien with bullets can feel horribly old-fashioned, of course; so maybe what we need is a dual-use gun that fires a) exploding bullets and b) bursts of plasma energy.  Such a gun would be a fearsome and terrible thing, and it's hard to imagine any organic creature being able to survive such an attack.

This means - BAD NEWS! START AGAIN! - that the alien we are fighting will be instantly and easily killed.  If there's an entire army of aliens, each with twelve arms and three heads and brandishing swords, then a single human warrior can simply hose down the motherfrakkers with his dual-use gun and kill tens of thousands of aliens before any of them get near enough to lop his (or her) head off.

That, frankly, is a really bad action scene. It's a massacre, a turkey-shoot; and hence, is no fun to read about.  Instead of enjoying the kick-ass action, the reader, confronted with his unfair massacre, is going to start thinking moral thoughts like: is it right to kill these poor aliens in the first place?

So the answer is - give the aliens body armour!  We fire plasma blasts at them, and alternate that with explosive bullets; but the plasma and the bullets bounce off  the aliens' super-hard body armour and they keep on coming with their swords and, er, lop our hero's head off.

Well that was crap too.  The novel is over, and the writer is consigned to the dustbin of history.

So the answer has to be: make the aliens and the humans fairly evenly matched in terms of weaponry and defensive capability. Maybe the aliens DON'T have body armour, but they have a special Thingummy that allows them to become invisible. So our plucky soldiers are fighting an enemy they can't see. If they see it, they can kill it; but they can't see the frakker! Now that works.

And that of course is pretty much the action-scenario of Predator. 

The Predator can camouflage itself so that our plucky soldiers can't see it to kill it.  When they do see it, it's too fast.  So as a result - the Predator can't be defeated!

But that's crap also, so

BEWARE MINOR PLOT SPOILER, BUT I REALLY DON'T THINK IT'LL HURT THAT MUCH

we contrive things so that Arnold Huge-Biceps Shwarzenegger discovers a way to camouflage HIMSELF, so the Predator can't see HIM.  And that's now an elegant piece of action-story plotting.  For it seemed as if the hero couldn't win, he was up against unbeatable odds; but lo and behold, he now finds the one chink in the armour of his enemy that makes victory possible. 

It's comparable to the case of the Greek hero Achilles, who was unkillable because he was dipped in a magical river Styx as a child; but his enemies learned that in order to be dipped, he had to be held by his heel, which hence was not invulnerable.  So his enemy Paris shot an arrow  into the back of Achilles' foot, and killed him! Everyone, in other words, has an Achilles' heel, especially Achilles.

And to find the enemy's weak spot - well that takes brain work. For action scenes are of course not the same as scenes of violence.  Violence is just killing; action is killing + THINKING.  A dumb hero who kills is not a hero at all, he (or she) is just a murdering psychopath.

Action scenes are, I would argue, the core and staple of most modern SF writing.  That wasn't always the case; I have plenty of books on my shelves that are cerebral SF explorations of ideas and themes.  But you would be hard pressed - I would tentatively suggest - to make a living as an SF novelist nowadays if all you do is write 'novels of ideas' in which clever concepts are unpicked.  Without kick-ass, books don't sell; so even the cerebral writers do kick-ass.

Take Asimov's Foundation trilogy; I loved it as a boy and as a young man, but when I re-read it, I was amazed at how little kick-ass action it contains.  Roland Emmerich is now doing a movie of it; and the first thing his talented screenwriters will do is add kick-ass - thus, obviously, defiling the very essence of the piece. Hollywood has already done that very thing with its adaptation of I, Robot.  Asimov fans will remember that the core premise of his robot books is the Law of Robotics that says a robot cannot harm a human being.

So guess what - these murdering frakking robots do NOTHING BUT harm or try to harm human beings.  They are psychopathic robots, which makes a mockery of Asimov. They are also ridiculously easy to kill - Will Smith knocks over dozens of the frakkers. Which is why this is a dull action movie.

In The Matrix, however, which is a GREAT action movie, Neo is given powers which make him more powerful than anyone else in the Matrix, ie the bad guys. So what do they do? They give Mr Smith CLONES, so that Neo has to fight an army. He goes from overdog to underdog in a single plot twist; and we CARE again. 

I love writing SF action scenes, and I take a lot of care to study other writers and how they achieve their effects.  Of course, there are no immutable rules about how to write Action SF, which makes a total nonsense of the title of this blog. So, ignoring that awkward fact, here are some rules - culled from experience and keeping my eyes open - of How To Write Action SF.

RULE 1:  ESTABLISH A PROTAGONIST WITH AN ATTITUDE.

Whoa! I hear you think - what's this got to do with writing action? Action is all about kicking ass; 'attitude' is all about tone, and style, and character.  But it's still my rule number 1.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

Wedged into the mirror's frame was Axl's driving licence which showed a round-faced European male with spiky, peroxide-blond hair...

Age 29, height 6'!", weight 152 lb, name Axl Borja, status human. It lied about everything except his height, and that was only true if Axl wore Cuban heels....he was using another name these days too. Which one didn't matter. He changed them as regularly as he swopped his dead-end jobs flipping hamburgers.

This is from Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Red Robe, which I revere as the book which rekindled my passion for science fiction; it's the book that taught me that SF novels had become cool again.  And it's a book with the wonderful log line:

Ex-assassin All Borja has secrets. The least of them is he's just agreed to do one last hit. The only problem is, he hasn't yet told his gun.

Wow! This is one book you just HAVE to read.

And that's what I mean by 'attitude'.  Action per se is, as I say, just violence;  but the EXPECTATION OF VIOLENCE FEATURING A COOL PROTAGONIST is, truly, action at its best.  So in the para above, Jon is preparing his ground; he tells us this guy looks cool, seems ordinary, but nurses a dark secret. We know bad stuff will happen to this guy; but we already suspect he will be more than a match for the bad guys. We EXPECT action, in other words; and that gets our adrenalin pumping and our synapses twitching (assuming that synapses do in fact twitch - but let's not get TOO hung up on the science stuff just for now.)

Here's another example of Attitude, from Richard Morgan's Black Man:

He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez.

Here's how it would be in a literary novel:  the protagonist would be introduced, he would have a backstory, and character flaws, and angst, and anxieties, and a family, and most of all (beware, screenwriting cliche ahead!) his 'wants' and 'needs' would be clearly identified.

Here's what Morgan tells us about his protagonist:  He. 

Yup, that's it. The one word, 'He'. We don't even know the guy's name!  But we do know what he IS. He's  a hunter; he's smart; and he's out to get this guy Gray.  And we know, by the end of the first sentence, that Shit Is Going To Ensue.

And so it does. Our protagonist - Carl Marsalis - comes off worst in an encounter with a knife, he is stabbed, but his enhanced conditioning kicks in, there's a chase, a clumsy shoot-out - and Carl wins. He doesn't win easily, things go wrong, but he copes, and he prevails, ruthlessly.  At every moment in this action set-piece there's no guarantee that Carl will win - we don't even know if we WANT him to! - but he does. 

And that's great action.

Here's the definition and embodiment of Attitude,  as embodied by the protagonist in an action story:

The clothes are cheap, he can't afford a razor, the poncho is REALLY naff...but you know immediately that this guy is trouble.  He doesn't seek it; he just IS it.  That's Attitude.

Rule Number 2:  Suspension of Morality

Action is, first and foremost, about killing other sentient creatures. This is morally wrong.  If your boss is mean to you, you have no right to blow his brains out.  If you want a planet that's occupied by another sentient species, you have no right to kill them all just so you can plant potatoes and palm trees and bask under an alien sun.

So for action to work, there has to be not just Suspension of Disbelief, there also has to be Suspension of Morality.  Thou Shalt Not Kill is a commandment that is of no use whatsoever to the writer of action.  Thou Shalt Kill, Plentifully and Bloodily and With Gratuitous Gore is the action writer's only commandment.

So when is it justified to kill others?  Well in self-defence obviously.

And also when your enemy is UGLY: 

Or when your enemy resembles the kind of bug we hate to have in the bathroom:

 Or when your enemy looks like a vacuum cleaner:

Another time-hallowed option is to create an enemy which resembles that annoying Russian President, Leonid Brezhnev:

This brute is both a) Ugly and b) reminscent of the actual enemy of Americans during the Cold War years when this show (NO points for guessing the name of the show) was made. 

The trick of course is to contrive an enemy who we, the reader, fear and hate; and that way we won't quibble about seeing hundreds of the frakkers slain by our protagonists.

But often, of course, war is wrong; wars are fought for stupid reasons, or the wrong reasons, and a decent liberal humane person has to accept that it's better to wage peace, not war. 

This admirable sentiment is fatal for the writer of Action SF; the war has to be vicious, and full of horror, and the violence has to escalate! More ass has to be kicked! (Which, you know, is kind of awful really; but as least we're not as morally murky as those evil bastards who write horror.)

However, a number of writers do play complex games with our morality in teling their stories.  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War for instance is a masterpiece of Action SF which (SPOILER AHEAD, BUT I'LL TRY AND BE VAGUE) has an ending that is morally complex and challenging to our whole understanding of what has gone before.

Sometimes, in other words, it turns out that our hero is WRONG too kill these bad guys; and that can be a powerful twist.

But, moment by moment, scene by scene, we have to root for the protagonist who is killing other people.  Even if we end up wondering if he's morally wrong - like Carl Marsalis, a hired killer - we have to want him to win during the actual action scene/sequence.  Or the life goes out of the action;  and the reader starts to doubt the validity of his or own pleasure. And that's when books get thrown in the bin which (let me be clear) is what we DO NOT WANT.

So, NEVER LET SUCH MORAL MURKINESS IN BEFORE THE ACTION IS MOSTLY OVER. Until that moment when you bare your liberal conscience, make the enemy ugly, inhuman, ruthless, utterly evil, and hence easy to hate...even if you reverse our perceptions and moral assumptions at a later stage.

3) Justify your visuals

Every job has its occupational hazards.  Firefighters walk into burning buildings; paramedics often have to deal with violent drunks; soldiers get shot and bombed. And writers of action science fiction novels have to wrestle with the vexed question of defining the POV of their storytelling.

Jeez, those other guys have it SO easy.

The question of defining POV is different in the movies, where you have a handy thing known as 'ubiquitous POV'.  (For instance, in the movie 2012, you have all those shots of buildings falling into the sea etc, even though none of our regular characters bear witness to this.)  Most action movies use ubiquituous POV freely; or they might use antagonist POV, where you see what the hero is doing, but you're also allowed to see what the villain is doing too.  Hardcore single POV films tend to be arthouse fare (e.g. the recent Fishtank) or crime dramas (eg Chinatown). 

But the point is - in the movies it's easy to switch from protagonist POV to ubiquitous POV. In a film like High Sierra, for instance, we the audience see everything from the POV of main character Roy Earle  (Humphrey Bogart), UNTIL he's being chased by the cops; then we cut to the cops chasing him.

In a novel, however, if you write the entire book in the first person or in the third person POV mode, you CANNOT then cut to scenes not featuring your POV's eyes.   You can only say in your writing what your POV character sees. 

It sounds technical, but it's a major issue for writers of action. Because in action scenes, especially in huge space battle scenes, YOU HAVE TO SEE ALL THE ACTION.  You can't have this, for instance:

Reilly and Dwyer sit in front of the TV, switching channels. 

'According to CNN,' said Reilly, 'the alien ships have just encountered the first wave of our space defence force.'

'My God,' said Dwyer. 'My brother in law is a pilot on one of those defence ships - let me call him on my mobile phone so he can tell us what's happening!'

This kind of scene does not play well with lovers of action SF; they want to be UP THERE with the defence force, killing alien ass at first hand.  The brother in law, in short, has to be the POV character; Reilly and Dwyer must be relegated to collateral damage.

Of course, it's possible to have an 'omniscient  narrator' - this is the way Dickens used to write.  He'd be the god of the story, describing to us what HE saw with his eyes - the chimney sweep on the crossing, the old man in his Curiosity Shop, etc etc.  But the danger is, when you use this voice, there's a loss of immediacy.  It CAN still be done, but has to be done sparingly.

Take this, the opening of Asimov's Foundation:

The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included all the planets of the Galaxy...' etc. 

In fairness that's just the prologue; but even so, it's dry as dust, pure expository prose. Contract that with the real beginning of the book, Park I, which has a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica, then follows it with:

There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considered too dry for our purposes in any case.

That's the narrator as character - Asimov himself, mocking his own sources for their dryness. It's the Storyteller Voice.  And that's certainly still one way of achieving ubiquitous POV. Douglas Adams does it brilliantly in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Far out in the uncharterted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy, lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

It's exposition we adore, because it's the voice of our Narrator, the adorable Douglas.

But in Action SF, the ominscient narrator is harder to pull off.  Who, the reader may ask, IS this guy? And if he or she is narrating it, does that mean the action has already happened, the result is already known?  The omniscient narrator, then, can interfere with the vital 'present-tenseness' of the action writing, the illusion it's all happening NOW (even though the prose is technically in the past tense.)

To get over this problem, many action SF writers use the old trick of multiple POV. In other words, if you have enough characters, damn it all, at least ONE OF THEM must be there to witness the big action setpiece space battle.  Peter F. Hamilton favours this approach - he has so many character-POVs that you  need a flow chart to keep up (but remarkably, it always holds together, grippingly.)

I've also recently been reading Scott Westerfeld, who is a master of this multiple-POV approach. In The Risen Empire, for the first long section, he tells the story of a single setpiece action sequence  from the POVs of a vast range of characters - Pilot, Captain, Executive, Officer, Doctor, Pilot, compound mind (hey, this is SF), and so on.  Some of these characters settle down to be actual PROTAGONISTS; but several of them hold no long-term value; they are only there because of what they SEE.

And thus, by alternating from character to character to character, Westerfield achieves a perfect widescreen experience; we the reader see everything that a film camera would and could see.  We see the major characters, the minor characters, the long shots, the close ups - it's a stunning replication of a cinematic experience though artful prose.  And damn it, it's exciting.

(And, in Debatable Space, I vary this technique by having multiple POVs all in the first person.)

But even that isn't enough!  It's okay in the ground wars, and the classic mano a alien battles (John Scalzi has a great example of this in Old Man's War, in which the super-powerful aliens with their super-duper weapons 'prefer' to fight the human soldiers in single combat. Why! How dumb are they! But it makes for an exhilarating action SF setpiece.) But when it comes to space opera battles - who can possibly see all THAT?  The heroes in their space ship see what's on their screen; the villains in their space ships see what's on THEIR screens.  But there's no conceivable justification for seeing - at first hand - missiles flying through space, hitting space ships, being deflected by shields, etc etc etc.  All the great action scenes you witness in shows like Battlestar Galactica are only possible if you have cameras, or if you have established an Asimovian omniscient narrator voice.

I'm talking about images like this:

Great images - but who is seeing this? No pilot in a spaceship would have such a clear view, so you can't describe it UNLESS you have a) microcameras in space b) a spaceflying alien's POV c) an omniscient narrator or d) balls of steel.

Rule 4)  Define and escalate your jeopardy

This is the killer; it's the hardest thing to do and also the most important.

Let's say your troop of human soldiers arrive on an alien planet and start killing aliens. Why? 

Blood flows, limbs are lopped off, alien gore is spilled, plasma blasts burn, bombs explode...

But why?

It doesn't matter how 'enjoyable' (sorry, but we can't deny we love this stuff!) the violence is, it means nothing unless there's an objective, and a jeopardy.  That doesn't mean it has to be a 'just war'.  You could have soldiers killing aliens just to steal their land; but if your likeable heroine is abducted and is about to be eviscerated or worse -  then suddenly SOMEONE WE CARE ABOUT is in jeopardy. And we know Why; and any amount of bloodshed from thereon in is permissible.

So writing jeopardy is all about asking the question, 'What's at stake?' and 'Who's in jeopardy?'

When I worked in TV drama we would sit around a table and brainstorm these questions for hours on end.  So the bad guy has escaped from police custody and is about to murder another victim. Well, yawn, who cares? But if the bad guy has escaped and has abucted the hero's cute 5 year old daughter - massive jeopardy!! We all care!

All Hollywood movies work around this jeopardy template.  What's at stake, who's in jeopardy, and is the somebody who's in jeopardy vulnerable and cute?  If the hero's cantankerous old bat of a granny has been abducted by the aliens - well, a) it's not as exciting and b) you do rather feel sorry for the aliens.

But it's not enough to have one jeopardy; there have to be multiple jeopardies, which escalate by the end.  Humanity itself is usually at stake in action SF stories - the planet Earth will be destroyed unless we kick this particular alien ass!  But jeopardy can be subtler. It may be it's the hero's integrity that's in jeopardy.  The hero - a brilliant soldier - has killed aliens all his career and has suddenly realised it's humanity who's the bad guy here. So he has a moral choice; do the right thing, or the wrong thing? And if he does the right thing - he's saved his integrity! Even if he loses the battle, he'll have won the story.

This, pretty much, is the story of Avatar; and also the story of High Noon. A man's gotta do what a  man's gotta do; if he doesn't, he loses his soul. 

And jeopardy is also tied in with POV.  Every time you create a POV in a novel, you create a character that the reader has to care about - even if it's only a brief cameo role.  And once the heroes of the story are defined, then those are the people the reader will care about most.  So they, by definition, must be MOST in jeopardy; and their integrity, and morality, must be the most challenged.

So when you write from the POV of a character, you're not just creating 'eyes'; you're creating a character the reader can care about, and love or hate.  And you do this a) because creating rich characters is a pleasure in itself and b) because (from the action SF writer's perspective) you can't have exciting action stuff unless IT INVOLVES THE POTENTIAL DEATH OR MUTILATION OF CHARACTERS THE READER GIVES A SHIT ABOUT.

God, that sounds cold-blooded;  but it's true.  Action without character can work okay on a movie screen - where you can lose yourself in the spectacle. But it doesn't work nearly so well on the page, where the reader's empathy has to be snagged on the writer's hook. 

Rule number 5) Give your characters a break

The perfect action story is a series of exciting setpieces intricately woven together and escalating to an even more exciting finale.  But you can't achieve this if EVERYTHING is action.  There needs to be light, in order for there to be shade.

One of the most impressive pieces of action writing I've ever read is the original screenplay of The Fugitive by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart. I read it for a film company who were looking at acquiring distribution rights for certain territories; and I was awed at the sheer shameless pace of the damned thing. In the opening scene the prison van containing Dr Richard Kimble crashes and Kimble escapes; and he doesn't stop running after that!  Setpiece led to setpiece with barely a pause for breath - but that 'barely' was esssential.  Running away; searching for clues about the one-armed man; cleverly evading capture; running away again - that was the underlying rhythm.  The mystery and the chase interwove to create non-stop suspense, with (as I recall) a single slight romantic digression, because the writer knew that's what was needed.

In fact there are two versions of this version of the Fugitive. The script I read by Twohy is the one that blew me away; Jeb Stuart did the major rewrite which was actually filmed, and was different in very many respects - the setpieces, the characters, and the addition of the brilliant Tommy Lee Jones 'shithouse' speech.  But both versions were brilliant in my view because they both preserved the balance between action & mystery; the suspense never faltered, but the action was never repetitious, or 'so-what-ish'.

So variety is a key tool for the action SF writer.  Sometimes there's action; but sometimes there's suspense (which is anticipated action). And sometimes there's mystery (who's to blame for the frakking action which killed X or Y?)  And sometimes there are gentle subtle character scenes (establishing characters who the reader can empathise with SO THEY GIVE A SHIT WHEN THOSE CHARACTERS ARE KILLED OR INVOLVED IN DANGEROUS ACTION.)

Writing action SF is a tough job - nay, a dangerous job!  It's very easy for the Action SF writer to be struck by an off-target simile, or wounded by a hyperbolic description of gross carnage.  We constantly imperil our moral sense by revelling in scenes of murder and depravity.  But we are a fearless and indomitable breed, and never falter as we go about our business of killing and maiming bad guys and endangering the lives of adorably cute secondary characters. 

In conclusion, I should just say that these brief comments about how to write Action SF are no substitute for the real thing; so get out there, and kill!

Is Urban Fantasy Really ALL About Sex?

I remember the moment when the truth dawned on me...I was  just a nipper and I was watching a Hammer House of Horror movie featuring Christopher Lee as Dracula - and it struck me that what vampires do is JUST LIKE SEX.

Except, in fact, it's not; when vampires feed, they take fluid out; but when you have sex,  you...okay okay I'm moving on.  But the basic insight - which came to me when I was 12 or 13 - is this: vampirism is a compelling and unmistakable metaphor for sexual intercourse.

And, of course, I'm  not exactly the only person who's noticed this fact...

The American TV vampire series True Blood takes the implicit metaphor and really bangs it out there. It's sex, sex, sex all the way...the high point for me came when Sookie's brother takes vampire blood in a pill and gets a hard on so enormous he's in agony and has to have all the blood surgically removed from - no, no, that's another sentence I'm not going to finish.

The old Hammer vampire films were relatively tame ; it's not until you get to classics like The Vampire Lovers (1970) that it all starts getting steamy.  (Okay, film nerds out there, correct me if you wish!)  But the icky-sticky sexy stuff was there all along; for The Vampire Lovers was based on Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire short story Carmilla, arguably the first ever vampire story (okay book nerds, shoot me down there too!) Here's a flavour of Le Fanu:

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever'. (Carmilla, Chapter 4).

Of course vampire stories and urban fantasy stories aren't necessarily the same thing; though to be honest, the distinctions seem elusive to me.  Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot is a definitive reinvention of the vampire myth; but it's not urban fantasy, it's small town America fantasy/horror.  And Kim Newman's great Victorian vampire novels Anno Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron are awash with sex (like the vampire stripper scene in which  - no, I'm really not going to speak that one out loud) but they're aren't contemporary.  And as I understand, urban fantasy has to be urban, cool, & now. 

But the general point is this: urban fantasy is a booming genre, as publisher Tim Holman has conclusively demonstrated. And urban fantasy seems to me to be awash with sex.

And are those two things connected?

Of course urban fantasy is often (always?) horror, and horror is by definition a sensationalist genre.  But the thesis I'm reaching towards here is this: urban fantasy readers like sex - more than that they like stories about CHARACTERS having sex - and the whole genre is dominated by an assumption that stories have to be about people, relationships, and feelings. And - sorry, a four letter word is about to be used here - LOVE.

And this is why there's such a huge gulf between the hardcore SF reader and the died-in-the-wool urban fantasy writer. SF thrives on gadgets, gizmos, and huge space battles; urban fantasy is about characters and their emotions.

Wild generalisation? You bet!

I'm not, I stress, arguing that science fiction is prudish; far from it. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land tapped into the 60s free love ethos and its advocacy of polyamory still exerts a strong pull over the core SF readership.  Anyone who's on the mailing list for this year's Odyssey will know there has been a huge debate about the connections between science fiction/fantasy and bondage, polyamory, and other sexual life choices.

And modern SF writers are far from shy about writing explicit sex scenes.  Charles Stross' superb Saturn's Children, for instance, is written as a homage to Heinlein but is FAR filthier. It's set in a world where humans have died out, and robots are left behind; and these robots are horny and love sex.  It's an adorable tongue-in-cheek novel that's as amusing as it is graphic.

Or take Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void, in which  the character of Araminta has sex with a 'multiple human' - one personality shared between multiple bodies - called Mr Bovey. Araminta wakes from a dream to find the Mr Boveys are pleasuring her:

The gossamer breath of nebula dust firmed up into strong fingers sliding along her legs; more hands began to stroke her belly, the another pair squeezed her breasts. Sweet oil was massaged into her skin with wicked insistence. Tongues licked with intimate familiarity.

'Time to wake up,' a voice murmured.

On the other side of her, another voice encouraged, ''Time to indulge yourself again.'

(And after that, it gets REALLY steamy...)

So there's no way that the modern SF writer is shy about writing 'down and dirty' sex scenes in the far future; and all too often these may involve differently evolved human beings, or even acts of exophilia, ie sex with aliens.  (As in Eric Brown's masterly short story 'Star Crystals and Karmel' in the collection The Time Lapsed Man and Other Stories.)

But my point here is that in science fiction and traditional fantasy, sex is an element of the storytelling - it's something characters do in the course of the story.  But in certain subgenres of urban fantasy, sex IS the story. 

In other words, the very premise of a vampire story is a sexual metaphor; the deflowering of a virgin, the loss of innocence, the ravishing of a nubile woman or a virile man, often in bed, by a monster. 

And by the same token, the very premise of a werewolf story is also a sexual metaphor; the beast unleashed, the shapeshifting, the feet that grow (!!! that's called 'metonymy', think not 'foot' but some other body part) and the surrender to wild bestial passion.

Urban fantasy IS sex in other words.  

Of course sometimes the sexual metaphor is underplayed, and is drowned out by other metaphors.  Charlie Huston for instance is writing a terrific series about a vampire in a version of New York (I've just read the first, Already Dead) in which vampires run the gangs; here vampires are the Mafia, rather than being sexual monsters. There are some racy scenes, admittedly, but the dominant metaphor isn't sexual. 

But all too often, these two subgenres - vampire and werewolf stories - offer the writer a way to explore the human condition ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD TO HAVING SEX, and falling in love.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for instance, is many things; but the dominant strand (for me) is the story of a young woman's sexual awakening (the whole Angel romance) and her discovery of herself as a independently minded sexual being.  I love the fights in Buffy; but the moments and images I remember most vividly are when Buffy is haunted by sorrow because she has a broken heart. 

Nicole Peeler's heroine Jane True (in her series which begins with Tempest Rising) offers an intriguing variation on this 'urban fantasy is all about sex' approach. For Jane is not a vampire, she's a selkie - half-seal, half-woman - and let's be frank about this: that's REALLY sexy.  If you don't believe me, listen to THIS SONG (chosen by Nicole) about a murderous selkie, and then read Nicole's hot prose.  In fact here's an excerpt (note: Old Sow is the local name in this New England town for a dangerous whirlpool):

I used the riptide caused by one of the Sow's piglets to help me shoot up into the air so I could dive back down like a porpose.  I landed more heavily than I'd anticipated, the piglet forcing me into a strong current that wanted to carry me to her mother. I fought hard to free myself but the current had me in its vicelike grip. The Old Sow was nowhere near the most powerful of the Earth's whirlpools, but she was far too strong even for my freakish swimming abilities.

You see what I mean! If being caught up in a whirlpool as a half-woman, half-seal isn't a metaphor for sex, then I don't know what it is.  And okay, that's pretty extreme and kinky and, er, damp sex; but the sensuality of the language and the intensity of the 'surrendering to passion' subtext are, in my view, undeniable. (Unless, ahem, I'm just really odd?)

There are, I should add, some very graphic sex scenes between Jane and her vampire lover later on in the book; but my point is that it's the very premise that's sexy.  The whole concept of the book is about what it is to be a sensual beast; rather than being a sensible, cerebral geek in nerdy clothing (as I, for instance, am for most of the time.)  

I'm also, as readers of this blogsite will know, a huge fan of Dante Valentine, Lilith Saintcrow's ass-kicking private necromance character in the series of books which begins with Working fot the Devil. These books have a fabulously well worked out future history, and the action scenes are intense and exciting. But the whole point of the book, really, is Dante's love life; her passions, her confusions, her love/hate relationship with her various lovers. And, more than anything, it's about the intense and toxic love between a human being (who becomes part-demon) and an actual demon.  That's Japhrimel of course;  powerful, arrogant, wearing a black cape, patronising  to Dante yet adoring her, and terrifyingly protective of 'his' woman.  He's a demonic Heathcliff; a man so sexy he sizzles. 

And again there are exceptions to this rule; there are plenty of urban fantasy books (especially YA books) which AREN'T all about sex.  (Although even then, if you  think of Stephanie Meyer's tales about a celibate vampire - isn't the absence of sex another way of being ABOUT sex?)

My simple point though is that there's a strong subgenre of urban fantasies which are love stories as much as they are kick-ass supernatural thrillers; and that fact intrigues me.  You couldn't write a crime novel that was more about the sexual and emotional desires of the main characters than about the who-dun-it unfolding of the plot; but in SFF, all things are possible. 

And this is where the subgenre of 'paranormal romance' comes into the argument.  This is a subgenre that buds off from 'romance' rather than from SFF; there's nothing wrong with that in my view, though I've seen comments on the blogosphere that are deeply hostile to this whole literary trend.  Most people who love SFF are attracted to great stories, wonderful concepts, and compelling characters; we're not looking for 'romance' as such.

And yet - a good romance is possibly the greatest story which any writer can tell.  So I'm happy to read SF or fantasy or urban fantasy with sex and love and romance as vital story strands.

But I have to reluctantly concede that it's only the urban fantasy writers who get to write ALL about sex...

Sensual SF

I think SF should be sensual...if you want to know why, have a peek here.

The Man Who Wrote the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I've just finished Stieg Larsson's marvellous crime thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.   It's the third book in a trilogy, but with  typical incompetence, I bought the second book - The Girl Who Played with Fire -  before the first, and read it on holiday.  So I have been reading them in the wrong order (and I also won't read the third book until it's out in paperback.)

It's a tribute to the quality of Larsson's storytelling that the books make sense this way round - book 2 scrupulously explains all that has happened before, so I had no trouble following it. And I found it rather satisfying to see events happening in Book 1 to which I knew the consequences. 

And both novels are densely plotted, gripping, and rich in amazing characters, several of them extraordinary at a genetic level (though even so, this is a long way from being science fiction!)  I'd say that all the praise heaped upon these books is deserved. They are, admittedly, written in heavily expositional prose - sometimes verging on guide-book prose - and there were times when it felt like being trapped in a lift with a garrulous history lecturer.  But Larsson's a storyteller, not a stylist; and I was hugely impressed at the way he interweaves his different tales. In Dragon Tattoo, he pulls off the rare feat of  bringing a murder story to a climax - and THEN re-embarking on the novel's original story, which is all about a crooked financier, and having a second climax that is even better than the first.

I always think that when you read a great novel, you end up loving the author.  Stephen King, for instance, is present on every page of his best novels (when the 'King' voice is absent the books are sometimes, though not always, less good.)  And it's impossible to read a Neil Gaiman without believing that you know and are best friends with this amiable, witty, soft-hearted, hard-headed richly imaginative guy. 

In the same way, I felt I came to know and like Larsson. I could tell, from the way he writes, that he's a 'fact' person, an intense person, an obsessive person; but also that he has a big heart, and  a love of life.  He's very interested indeed in sex, and loves and understands women. And his political fervour and insight is utterly genuine (he had a career as a radical journalist before writing the three books of his Millennium trilogy.)

Do you get that feeling too? A sense that a writer whose work you love is at some level your friend?  Someone you'd love to spend time with?

Tragically, that will never happen.  Larsson died at the age of 50, of a stupidly capricious heart attack, just after delivering the manuscripts of his three novels. 

I knew about Larsson's untimely death before I read the books, and thought it was very tragic. But now I've actually read the books - I have a feeling of actual grief. Of course, I never knew him; of course, he never knew me.  But dammit, I miss him.

1984: SF Masterpiece?

 It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were      

striking thirteen.

This is the opening line of a book I consider to be one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. It is the story of a future world controlled by an all-powerful dictatorship which punishes rebellious thoughts as savagely as rebellious actions. It tells the story of an ordinary man - Winston Smith - who comes to doubt the very foundations of his society.  It dawns on him that history is falsified on a daily basis - for he is one of the people charged with falsifying it! - and that the people are controlled, not by fear, but by a form of mind control known as 'doublethink'.

I read this science fiction masterpiece first as a teenager, at about the same time as I read the classic works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, and Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth.  These were all works of fiction which expanded my horizons, and made me think about the world, and challenged my received ideas, and which transported me to amazing and often ghastly imaginary worlds.

And the opening sentence above exemplifies all that I love most about the science fiction genre.  It's a humdrum, ordinary, prosaic descriptive sentence - it's April, it's cold, we're in boring old England (where you can expect to be cold in April), and the clocks are striking thirteen.  And it takes us a few moments to realise - clocks don't strike thirteen.  Logically, they could; but in our world, they just don't. 

And so, all of a sudden, we find ourselves inhabiting a world that did not exist until we embarked upon that deceptive first sentence.

And it's a world that, as the story continues, proves to be richly conceived, and beautifully described, in Orwell's wonderfully cadenced and eloquent prose.  Every citizen of this world has a television set in his or her living room; these televisions, known as 'telescreens', are ubiquitous in public places too.  But unlike the televisions we are familiar with, these telescreens are two-way artefacts; the telescreen watches us while we watch it.

And so privacy is impossible.  Dissent is impossible. Every waking moment, the citizens of this world are watched and scrutinised on behalf of a supposedly beneficent dictator known as Big Brother.

The book I'm referring to of course (obviously! the cover of it is at the top of this blog!) is 1984, by George Orwell. And it's a work of fiction that has become a byword for political and sociological prescience.  So much of what Orwell imagined in 1984 has come true in our own world. And the fact that 'Big Brother' himself has become the inspiration for a television reality show can be regarded as either witty post-modernism on the part of the programme-makers, or a chilling validation of Orwell's dystopian vision, depending on personal taste.

I've always regarded Orwell's novel as a template and benchmark for what can be achieved in the science fiction genre.  It's magnificently written, it's emotionally profound, it's sensual and sexual, it's intellectual, it's terrifying.  I used to love reading the old pulp SF stories about green aliens and Lensmen and Barsoom and Null-A and the like; but 1984 shows that a science fiction novel can also be great literature.

The status of 1984  as an SF icon has been an article of faith for me for many years; so it came as a major shock when I discovered a while back that some people don't think this book is science fiction at all.  And these are of course the same people who don't think The Hand Maid's Tale is science fiction, or don't accept that His Dark Materials is one of the great masterpieces of the Fantasy Genre.

There are, in fairness, some plausible reasons for supposing that 1984 is not in fact science fiction. The reasons are twofold; Orwell himself almost certainly didn't think it was science fiction, and many of his literary admirers also don't think it belongs to that genre.  So shouldn't these opinions be heeded? Isn't it for the author of the book, and the fans of the book, to decide the genre of the book?

I am going to argue otherwise; sorry, George, like it or not, what you wrote is sci-fi. 

Richard Burton as O'Brien, in the Michael Radford movie also starring John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton

So to tackle the first of the above reasons - does it matter what the author thinks, when it comes to defining the genre of a piece?  I would argue not. After all - writers can be the maddest of people, and they should be judged on what they write, not what they think they've written.

Genre is a fluid and oft-evolving beast, in any case.  For example, in nineteenth century England, one of the most successful literary genres was the 'shocker', as written by the great Wilkie Collins.  But the shocker genre no longer exists; Wilkie Collins' books are now generally found under Fiction, sometimes in the same editions as Tolstoy and Jane Austen.  Shockers have mutated into 'literature'.  But Collins' great thrillers always were 'great novels'; and they still work as shockers.  A book can be several things, all at the same time.

Interestingly, one of Collins' finest 'shockers' was The Moonstone, which is now considered to be (probably) the first ever detective novel.   And yet Wilkie Collins did not write in the 'detective novel genre', for no such genre existed at that time - since he above all others was instrumental in creating it.

My point here is that the author's notion of the work's genre doesn't necessarily have the casting vote.  The Moonstone is a detective novel because it is is a detective novel; it observes all the rules and traditions (before they became traditions) we associate with that type of writing.  It's structured as a mystery and who-dun-it, it has narrative shocks and twists, it has suspects and red herrings, and it plays fair with the reader - i.e. the writer doesn't withhold vital information. Later writers like Agatha Christie turned these rules into the principles behind a parlour game type of detective fiction. 

So how can genre be defined? Is the genre what the writer says it is, or what the publisher says it is, or what the reader thinks it is?  The truth, I would argue, and as the brilliant film genre theorist Rick Altman argues, is that all these perspectives play a role in creating the magical, nebulous, active entity we call 'genre'.  Genre is like language; it lives and changes according to how it is used.

So let me ask again: is 1984 a science fiction novel? The author wouldn't necessarily say so; the publisher didn't publish it as such; some critics regard it as an insult to the book to tar it with that brush. But for the loyal reader of SF, this novel fits the bill in every vital respect. For 1984 has all the vital distinguishing hallmarks of a science fiction novel, as its readers and critics know and love it.

So let me try and tick the list of those hallmark SF qualities which Orwell's novels exemplifies - and if I've missed any, do let me know in the Comments box.

First, this is a book based around concepts - speculations and extrapolations about a future world which are challenging and fasinating and would make the book worth reading even if it weren't so well written.  Newspeak, IngSoc, the notion of a perpetual and non-existent war, the control of memory, the Two Minute Hate, the factories where fictitious news is created, Room 101 - these are all fantastic, audacious ideas that linger in the mind and the imagination long after the book has been finished.  This to me is the very definition  of a science fiction novel - it makes the reader think about ideas. (As Ray Bradbury wrote, 'Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilisation birthing itself. ' The first phrase rather over-states the case, but the underlying point is, I feel, totally valid.)

Another key fictional strategy which we SF readers look for in our books is world building. This of course is  a vital element of both the science fiction and the fantasy genres.  A great science fiction novel will create a planetary civilisation, or even a galactic civilisation that is visualised and conceived in the finest detail - from Asimov's Foundation Empire to Niven's Known Space to Hamilton's Confederation to Banks' Culture.  (And in similar fashion the great fantasy writers will also conjure up entire civilisations, usually in places and times where magic was/is possible, and often with accompanying maps.)  This 'world building' technique isn't all that different to what Dickens and Tolstoy and Jane Austen do; the difference is that the SFF writers have to make it all up. 

And there's no doubt that 1984 is a magnificent example of 'imaginary world' world building.  The buildings, the people, the places, all are evoked with spectacular vividness. We follow Winston Smith into the world of the proles and their pubs, we see the long windowless hall of the Records Department, we even understand the geography that connects the Ministry of Love with the Ministry of Truth.  We watch with amazement the choreographed idiocy of the Two Minute Hate.  Almost every aspect of this imaginary world is conjured up with a superb degree of realism, and a loving attention to detail.

Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell in the 1950s BBC version of 1984, adapted by Quatermass writer Nigel Kneale

And a third defining characteristic of SF is its fondness for Future History. And this above all is the clincher in the debate, for Orwell throws himself into the task of creating a Future History with a zest that utterly betrays his inner nerd. One of the longest (and, admittedly, the least engaging) sections of the book contains the revolutionary text  of Goldstein, which outlines in remorseless detail every facet of the Future History of Orwell's imagined world.  This is not the work of a literary novelist 'slumming it' with fantastical ideas; this is the creation of a writer so in love with his Future History that he can't stop telling it all to the reader.  Orwell even creates his own language, Newspeak, and has an appendix explaining it.  Is there any difference between that and Tolkien's creation of Elvish?  Or my copy editor Bella Pagan's admirable obsessiveness in creating an alphabet and syntax for the Flame Beast language?

(It should, by the way, while perusing the above paragraph, be taken as read that as a card-carrying science fiction novelist I regard the word 'nerdish' as a compliment, not a criticism.)

It could be argued that despite all these defining SF characteristics, Orwell's novel fails as science fiction (or rather, fails to BE science fiction) because it's a satire, not a realistic novel.  As many critics have correctly noted, 1984 is actually a polemical commentary on 1948. Hence, its 'predictions' should not be taken at face value; Orwell is mocking the present, not attempting to foresee the future.

And, I would concede, in the case of Orwell's Animal Farm, I think this argument is totally convincing; for this book is not a 'fantasy' about talking animals.  Rather, it's a satire about Communism; you're meant to enjoy the wit, but you aren't meant to believe in the characters.

And in 1984  there is an undoubtedly a comparable satiric element in the accounts of the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love; and the way Winston Smith is brainwashed and forced to recant clearly echoes the Stalinist show trials of the 1940s.

But it's worth bearing in mind that many of the best science fiction novels have an element of satire and political commentary woven in with the extrapolation.  Two of the canonical works of SF literature - Gladiators-at-Law and The Space Merchants by the glittering writing team of Pohl and Kornbluth - are both blistering satires of their age; and yet they also work as extrapolative SF.  And Charles Stross's tremendously powerful novel Glasshouse posits a far future world in which human bodies can be moulded, and minds downloaded; and then forces his far future humans to take part in experiment in which they live the lives of 20th century humans.  It's a superb SF concept; but it's also a delightfully witty exploration of how human society of the kind that we actually live in manipulates and brainwashes citizens through the cunning use of peer pressure and social convention.  It's SF and it is satire.

The key issue here, I would say, is about the degree of realism.  Animal Farm is written in such a way that we always know the aniamls aren't really animals; we read it ironically, with a degree of detachment.  But 1984 is first and last a 'realist' novel. At every stage, Orwell uses his considerable powers as a writer to make us believe that everything that is happening is true.

And Orwell also, in the book's last section, explicitly compares his dystopian future world with the Russia of Stalin; and then explains how the world of Winston Smith is far far worse.  This is not satire per se; it's satire mixed with extrapolation, unified and exalted by the author's own belief in the truth of his imaginative creations.

For all these reasons, it seems to me that 1984 is a great novel which is also a great science fiction novel.  And even its flaws are typical of the flaws to be found in many otherwise fine SF novels; namely, a tendency to favour exposition about the minute details of the imagined world over dramatic development and character interaction. (Winston only has one real relationship in the whole book; and the way he is captured is infuriatingly cursory!)  And that's because, in my view, Orwell-the-SF- nerd is,  in these sections, winning out over Orwell-the-great-writer.

And this is why the long chunk of Goldstein's text is there - it kills the drama stone dead, but boy, if you're a nerd, it's fascinating! 

My view is that if you cut that section altogether, or at least down to the bone, and made Winston's arrest less inevitable, less the consequence of his own utter dumbness - then the book would be richer, and more thrilling, and more satisfying. Still, it's a masterpiece anway, so who am I to nitpick?

And there's a reason I want to claim 1984 as 'one of ours'.  For in my view, it's an SF novel that shows what SF can really do.  It can be satirical; it can be polemical; it can also be beautiful. 

For me, it's the bar raised as high, pretty much, as it can go.

Book Zone: The Bloody Red Baron

If you are squeamish, stop reading this blog now. I mean NOW.

Here goes.  Imagine you are in London in the early twentieth century, watching a vampire stripper on stage. And this is what you see:

Isolde clamped the blade between her thin lips and used both her hands.  She worked the edge of her self-inflicted wound with her nails and peeled back the skin of the right side of her chest. As she moved, exposed muscles bunched  and smoothed. With...

No - let's stop there!  A striptease in which the stripper flays herself?????

That is truly the most scary and appalling piece of prose I've read in many a year; it's also astonishingly vivid and skilfully written.  It appears in Kim Newman's awesome The Bloody Red Baron, which I've just read, and which will haunt me for some time to come.

Let's be frank; if you write horror novels, you can't be namby-pamby about it. They have to be scary.  However, I've always had a very limited appetite for blood and gore for its own sake; this is why I've never read widely in the horror genre.  But some writers - Stephen King is one, Kim Newman seems to me to be another - who can shock and appal and yet never lose sight of the heart and humanity of their characters. 

The Bloody Red Baron is a sequel to Newman's Anno Dracula (which I have to read next!) It's an alternate history story in which Dracula's Terror at the end of the nineteenth century has created a world in which vampire and humans ('warmfellows') co-exist.  But Dracula's rampant ambition has caused him to start World War I; he is now commander in chief to the Kaiser, and the world is plunged into carnage.

In this version of World War I, we still have trenches, there are still aerial dogfights, and there is still a Baron von Richthofen with his Flying Circus of fighter pilot killers.  But vampires fight side by side with warm soldiers; and night flights are far more common because vampires see so well in the dark.

It's a daft, baroque, but rather persuasive premise, executed with astonishing skill.  Newman is a master stylist - his prose is restrained, cadenced, beautifully in period, and hauntingly visual.  He has a genius for stamping vivid images in the reader's imagination - I can still see and smell and savour the thrilling events which make up the book's major setpieces.  I can see a prostitute being sucked dry by vampire mouths; I can see the desolate wilderness of No Man's Land; I can still, shockingly, see every moment of the scene in which our hero Winthrop has to climb from the back seat of his fighter planet into the front seat, whilst airborne. 

Writing images is the hardest thing to do - words flow easily enough on to the computer screen, but images have to be hinted at, with prose that states the image but also evokes the experience of seeing it.   Newman achieves this with astonishing confidence, and also has the knack of creating characters we truly care about - from the weary Charles Beauregard, to the heroic but increasingly deranged intelligence officer Winthrop, to the bespectacled vampire journalist Kate Reid.

It's also a slyly witty book, full of injokes and metajokes.  This alternate reality is littered with fictional characters who are real, co-existing with real characters who are radically changed, such as the vampire Churchill, lacing his blood with Madeira, and Von Richthofen himself, a real historical figure here portrayed as a chillingly inhuman killing machine. (And that's before he became a vampire.) One of the main characters is Edgar Allan Poe - who now prefers to be known as Edgar Poe - and he co-exists in the evil castle lair with Dr Caligari and Dr Mabuse, both characters from classic movies.  A No Man's Land deserter is called Mellors - the gamekeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover  -  but D.H. Lawrence himself is also referenced as existing in this world.  And, my favourite twist of all, Beauregard's secret missions are run on behalf of the Diogenes Club, a society of establishment figures dominated by Mycroft Holmes, cleverer brother of Sherlock. 

The cover of my edition of the book is deliciously schlocky - it features a vampire German soldier hanging upside down.  And as a horror novel, it delivers all the thrills and chills you could hope for. (There's a great story twist, which I won't betray, which leads to some of the most fantastic action sequences you could ever hope for.) 

But this is, at heart, a rather serious book. Newman writes knowledgeably and lovingly about his period, and he achieves the rare trick of making the reader think hard, and worriedly, about the calamity that was World War I.  The horror of the war itself - all real! - far eclipses the horror associated with the vampire characters. 

And so Newman achieves the rare trick of creating a genre novel that has a real 'literary' substance - it's not just shock 'n' scares, it's a novel designed to make the reader think, and feel, and regret.

Till now, my favourite vampire novel ever has been Stephen King's masterly epic 'Salem's Lot; but The Bloody Red Baron seems to me to be just as good, in its very different way.   King's approach was to create a vampire story that is also a portrayal of a 'typical' (and hence quite extraordinary) mid-Western town.  His model was Moby Dick - which is not a horror novel, and has no vampires, but which represents the 'bar' for a modern epic American novel. 

Newman is steeped in a different literary tradition.  His book is slim, it's not an epic; but it follows in the footsteps of great English genre writers, from Conan Doyle to Wilkie Collins to Margery Allingham (less well known, but who in my view is one of the greatest of the English detective novelists.)  His book is a 'shocker', but it's also understated, and full of British stiff-upper-lippishness.  Almost all the characters speak almost all the time with a calm, grave courtesy, and yet behave monstrously.  The effect is a delightful blend of the terrifying and the well-mannered. 

If you are squeamish, even just a little bit, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.  But if you can cope with horror that curls darkness around your heart and makes you wake screaming in the night - this is the novel for you.  It blends fantastical horror with real-life terror; and this wicked chimaera is then slivered with eerie eroticism,  and seasoned with artfully clever wit.

On the Raw Shark Texts

On the 30th April the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best SF novel published last year will be announced, at a ceremony held in tandem with the London Science Fiction Festival. 

This year's shortlist has attracted some controversy, since, as well as works by established masters like Ken McLeod and Richard Morgan, it includes a number of book which aren't obviously SF at all.  Some in the biz have argued that the judges have passed over some excellent candidates for the shortlist in favour of more 'literary' fare. (My own agent, John Jarrold, has argued this pithily, and with his usual authority - he's read every book on the shortlist, plus every single SF novel that he feels should have been on the shortlist.

I'm not so well read, so I'm attempting to educate myself by reading some of the novels on the shortlist that might otherwise have passed me by.  I have Sarah Hall's The Carullan Army on my shelf; and I've just finished reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which I thought was delightful and funny and often very moving.

But is it SF?  Hall himself argues, very sweetly, that he's happy for it to be called SF, because it's not for him to tell the reader how to read it.  That's a devastatingly good and wise argument. 

Being a genre nerd, however, I love to have things more firmly pigeonholed than that.   Dammit, Steven, stop being so fair-minded!

And for my money, though I loved it, I don't think of Hall's book as an SF novel.  Because I didn't, ultimately, believe a word of it, and I don't think I was meant to.

And what I mean by saying this is that for me SF is a genre that demands total suspension of disbelief. However silly the story elements may be (dilithium crystals, Barsoom, Stargazer aliens, variant 13s, um, flame beasts, etc) we, the SF readers, like to believe it might all be true.  We will forgive occasional science cheats, and plot cheats, and even moments of utter absurdity; we'll forgive almost anything really, if we're enjoying the read. But when I journey into outer space, or inner space, I want to believe I'm really going there...

Hall's novel, however, is much more postmodern than that.  It's a book which requires to believe its story; and also to disbelieve it.  It's overtly metatextual, as some literary theorists might say.  And it's very much in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges - the writer of wonderful metaphysical conceits - and Paul Auster, the postmodern crime novelists who is referenced several times, rather than the tradition of Heinlein and Asimov and Reynolds and Grimwood and Macleod and Hamilton and Macdonald, who all wrote about or write about worlds they believe in.

To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the plot of Hall's book so

BEWARE!!! PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!

The Raw Shark Texts is about a man called Eric Sanderson who wakes up and doesn't know who he is.  A psychologist explains he is suffering from amnesia, induced by pscyhic trauma after the tragic death of his girlfriend Clio. But then Eric gets a note from his former self (the First Eric Sanderson) explaining that he, Eric Two, is being stalked by an actual monster called a Ludovician Shark, which is a creature that exists in the n-dimensional realm of ideas. 

There's some science to justify this - on the basis that life is a hardy little bugger and can evolve in the strangest of places. So why can't it evolve in the realm of ideas????  As Eric 1 explains to his later self:

     The animal hunting you is a Ludovican. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause  and effect....The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on   human memories and the instrinsic sense of self.

 This is superb; but for me, it's also knowing, defiantly metaphorical, and not intended to be believed literally. And I like that aspect of the storytelling.  The hero travels through a tunnel made of books - well which of us hasn't, metaphorically?  And he is almost killed by a conceptual fish - as his personality is unpicked because of his deep grief at the tragic death of the woman he loved.  And again, the postmodern strings are showing, as the novel reveals itself to be 'really' about something other than what it seems to be about.

But, by contrast, a similiar but totally science fictional piece would be Eric Brown's masterful short story The Time-Lapsed Man.  I won't plot-spoil this one, but I would just say that, though the premise is utterly absurd, just as absurd as the notion of the Ludovician shark, the writer made me believe it was true for the duration of my reading.  And of course, because I believe the story is true, I care.

Having said all this, I have to quickly add that if anyone wants to argue that Hall's book genuinely is science fiction, I'd be happy to give that view credence, and shelf-room, and indeed to argue the point over a pint or two, since that's always a good way of enlivening a pint or two.  It's not for me to be the Ferryman on the River Charon, deciding who and who shouldn't get across. 

But my only anxiety is that any lover of SF who reads this book expecting to have a science fictional experience might be disappointed.  It doesn't, in my view, deliver as SF; but it does deliver as what it is, a tour de force piece of lunatic idea-spinning which is full of gags and has some of the most tender love scenes I've read in a long time.

I guess the judges' aim is to challenge our preconceptions about what is and isn't modern SF. I argued in another blog that Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods isn't, in fact, an SF novel, though some claim it is.  (On this score, I'm as one with Winterson, who witheringly refuses the SF label.)

But my point really is to passionately stress and affirm the common purpose of pretty much all the SF that I've ever enjoyed - namely, an underlying respect for rationality and of the ideas and sense of wonder which underly the scientific enterprise.

I may be wrong, however, in my opinions on this book. I may in fact be destined to become the next victim of a conceptual shark that swallows up all my ideas and memories and leaves me gibbering, and indeed, in much the state I was in on the morning after the last Eastercon.

But I would strongly recommend The Raw Shark Texts to anyone who wants a rollercoaster ride through the realm of ideas.  (And I hope my plot spoilers don't give away too much - it's no more than is explained on the back cover.)

On The Stone Gods

I've just finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson. 

I became intrigued about this book after reading a delightfully waspish review of it by Ursula K. Le Guin.  Winterson had publicly stated that her novel - which features space travel and robots and takes place partly in the future - should emphatically not be regarded as 'science fiction'.    This is a statement commonly made by literary novelists who write novels which are undeniably science fiction, but then decline to be associated with the hoi polloi SF writers who actually make a living in this genre. 

And so, clearly niggled at Winterson's words, Le Guin performed a forensic dissection of the novel, analysing its story-telling flaws and its tendency to lapse into nakedly expository writing - with long chunks of what Le Guin refers to as 'As you know, Captain' dialogue, of the kind that seasoned SF writers try to avoid.

I'm a great fan of Le Guin; but also a great fan of Winterson. I haven't read her complete works, but I love what I have read. My favourite of her novels is her magic realist masterpiece The Passion, which is full of images that haunt the mind.

So I decided to make my own mind up.  And, after reading the book, I came to an  interesting conclusion. Winterson is right; this is not science fiction at all.  It looks like SF, it has all the elements we commonly associate with SF but it's really a different genre of book entirely.

To explain what I mean by that, I have to define SF - which is easier said than done.  I always get annoyed when commentators assume that SF has to be set in the future, or feature spaceships, or be obsessed with technology, or be devoid of satirical intent.  SF is in fact a broad church genre.  It ranges from space opera to personal drama, it can be set in the past or in an alternative present, it can be satirical and polemical, it can be character-based, it can be all manner of things.

But there are certain defining characteristics that make a novel SF.  One of them, I would argue, is 'extrapolation', an imagining 'what if' process which takes aspects of the present and projects them into a different world (future, alternative present, or alternative past), in an exaggerated form.  And in my afterword to Debatable Space I define SF as the genre in which extrapolation, speculation and imagination collide. 

But another defining characteristic, I'd suggest, is that all SF has to be inspired by science.  That doesn't mean it has to be crammed full of scientific facts and figures.  It means that SF is fiction which absorbs and adores the scientific paradigm and zeitgeist.  It finds the drama in scientific theories like quantum physics and relativity; it imagines the human consequences of scientific developments like spaceflight; and it speculates about what would happen if impossibilities like time travel were to become scientifically possible. 

But it's the spirit of science that it is at the heart of SF.  An SF novel can't have magic, because magic is the antithesis of science.  And an SF narrative can't be illogical (or at least, it shouldn't be!) or self-contradictory.  Because science depends on consistency of theory; even bewildering theories like quantum physics which allow a particle to be in two places at the same time make sense.

Winterson's novel, however, is a tale which makes no sense.  I'm not referring to occasional errors and inaccuracies - all writers make such mistakes, and the copy editors can't hope to catch all of them. But at a fundamental, philosophical level, this novel doesn't make sense; and it isn't intended to make sense....That's not the game Winterson is playing.

To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the details of the plot; so if you haven't read it, BEWARE, PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW.

The Stone Gods is a novel made up of very different sections (like David Mitchell's excellent Cloud Atlas, which is partly science fiction, partly historical drama.)  The first section tells the story of Billie, a rebellious woman living on the planet of Orbus.  Almost all the inhabitants of Orbus are Fixed - they have fixed their genes so that they do not age. Billie, however, is defiantly unFixed, and hence mortal.

Orbus is in a state of terminal collapse because of global warming, and Billie joins an expedition to the new colony world of Planet Blue. She is accompanied by a Robo sapiens called Spike; and Billie and Spike fall in love. The Captain, Handsome, embarks upon a plan to rid Planet Blue of its dangerous land animals - dinosaurs - by crashing an asteroid into the planet. The plan goes wrong and the asteroid collision destablises the ecosystem to such a degree that all life is threatened.  Spike and Billie survive together for some time, with Billie detaching Spike's limbs to prolong her existence; and finally Spike dies.

The second section is set in the past and tells the story of the Easter Islanders who rendered themselves extinct. 

The third and fourth sections tell the story of a young woman called Billie Crusoe on Earth after a third world war.  She is a robotics expert who is developing a robot called Spike. And on a whim, she takes Spike's head for a walk into the forbidden territories, where she finds rebels and mutants and discovers the secret of her world after intercepting a radio message from the distant past. 

This secret unlocks the mystery of the novel.  The action in the first section is not - as most readers would assume - a tale about humans in the far future. It is a tale about humanoids in the distant past whose meddling led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and hence made the evolution of mankind on Earth aka Planet Blue possible.

This is a nice twist, though hardly unexpected; and in this respect, the story is a beautifully told and elegant example of an 'uplift' narrative in which we learn that mankind evolved because of aliens. 

But hold on a minute - how come the lead character in the first section has the same name as the lead character in the later sections?  'Billie' in the far distant past has a robot companion called Spike; 'Billie' in the near future has a robot companion called Spike also. 

And to compound the confusion, Earth Billie is reading a novel called The Stone Gods which she describes as 'science fiction'.  But if the Orbus story is true, no one on Earth can know about it.  It all happened 65 million years ago!

This makes no sense; and I believe it quite deliberately makes no sense, in the way that abstract art and certain kinds of modernist poetry make no sense.  It is non-sense, but not nonsense.

As I mentioned, Earth Billie is reading a book called The Stone Gods.  And the Orbus Billie, in parallel fashion, is reading the journals of James Cook; again, an impossibility since Cook was born 65 million years after Orbus Billie.  And Earth Billie - whose surname is Crusoe - meets a guide called Friday. What are the odds on that, then,  eh? 

This is not, I would strongly maintain, bad writing. It's skilful and very good writing of the avant-garde variety. At a very basic level, Winterson is confuting and mocking the underlying principle of science and hence science fiction - that ultimately, everything has a rational explanation.  Seemingly impossible events may happen in SF, but they will always be explicable by the laws of physics - even if these are not the laws of physics as we know them.  But Winterson's laws are the laws of poetry; she connects by simile and metaphor and mirroring and impossible coincidences.  The most beautiful connection of all concerns Spike the robot. In the Orbus story, Spike is a whole robot who is dismantled a limb at a time until all that remains is her head. It's a deeply evocative sequence which for me echoes the experience of a person seeing a lover die slowly of old age - as limbs and organs fail and all that is left is the shining, shimmering personality of the lover in her husk-like dying carcass. 

In the Earth story, Spike hasn't yet been built so Earth Billie carries her around as a head.  Thus, Spike-Head in one story becomes Spike-Head in the later story; and that mirroring is somehow rather wonderful. 

The Easter Island interlude is easy enough to interpret - it's not causally connection, it's just a variation on the theme (of human beings destroying their own habitat.)  But the other sections are written in non-rational logic; and that is why I say they are not science fiction. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, and a clever book; but SF it ain't.   

And this, I now believe, is why Winterson has said her novel isn't SF. It doesn't mean she hates SF (Earth Billie says she hates SF - but that's clearly a writer's gag!) It also doesn't mean that Winterson has failed to understand the essence of SF. In fact, the book shows a sophisticated grasp of world-building and scientific extrapolation which suggests to me Winterson has read a fair bit of science and SF and is fascinated by both.  But her intentions, on this occasion, are Other.

That leads to the question; what genre is this book? It's not magic realism, in my view - because even magic realism has rules and consistencies.  One impossible thing is allowed before breakfast  - like the village where no one grows old, in Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude.  But characters and events always feel real, and consistent; and actions always have consequences.

So this book is, in my view, a particular form of literary construct - a prose-poem, not a realist novel.  It reminds me strongly of Italo Calvino's Invisble Cities, in which explorer Marco Polo gives accounts of the cities he has visited to Kublai Khan.  Some argue (as I do in my radio play Marco Polo) that Marco Polo was a fantasist who never visited any of the cities he describes. And, playing with this idea,  Calvino's book is an evocation of imaginary places, rather than a realistic travelogue. Here is Marco writing about the city of Leandra:

Gods of two species protect the city of Leandra. Both are  too tiny to be seen and too numerous to be counted. One species stands at the doors of houses, inside, next to the coat rack and the umbrella stand; in moves, they follow the families and install themselves in the new home at the consignement of the keys. The others stay in the kitchen...they belong to the house, and when the family that has lived there goes away, they remain with the new tenants.

Or there's the spiderweb city of Octavia, in which the entire city is hung from hempen strands.  Or another city where the citizens are constantly engaged in dialogue; the same dialogue will continue for centuries, because as each speaker dies a new citizen steps up to continue the dialogue.

At one point, Kublai Khan complains to Marco: 'Your cities do not exist.  Perhaps they have never existed.'   But there's no doubt that  these imaginary cities exert a powerful hold over the reader;  and this slim volume by Calvino has had a remarkable influence over many writers.  I kept it by my side when I wrote Marco Polo; and now I come to look at it again, I realise how much I've been subconsciously influenced by Calvino in writing about the cities of Ketos. 

And I have a strong hunch that Winterson knows this book, probably far far better than I do, and is consciously or unconsciously using it as the springboard for her imaginary worlds in The Stone Gods.  Take this passage, where the crew swap stories about planets they have seen or heard about:

There's a planet they call Medusa. It's made of rock all right, but the rock has sharded and split so many times there's nothing solid - just strands of rock, splintered out from the surface like thick strands of hair...

There's a planet called Echo.  It doesn't exist. It's like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty...

We found a planet, and it was white like a shroud.  The planet was wrapped in its own death. We lowered ourselves through mists like mountains, cragged, formed, shaped, but not solid. Put your hand out and you put it through a ghost. Every solid thing had turned to thick vapour.

Later, we're told that the white planet is the original home of the Orbans; and that it shares a sun with the blue planet. This implies that the Orbans originally come from Venus, then travelled to a far planet somewhere else, before returning to Earth.  Except...that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So it's easier by far, in my view, to regard all these tales as being Winterson's own Invisible Planets - far fetched fables of wonder and delight.

It's clear I would hope from the passages quoted above why I  adore the playful imagination of Jeanette Winterson's book. And much of the prose (especially in this first section) is rich in verbal beauty, with cadences that stir the soul, and a command of style that reveal Winterson to be one of the finest writers of our age.

Overall, though, I have to say that the book disappoints.  It overeggs its pudding - I love the story told by Captain Handsome which explains how history is destined to repeat itself.  But to hammer that point home by showing history repeating itself on Earth, complete with two characters with the same name, seems to me to be talking down to the reader somewhat.  It's a wonderful idea - we get it! - now move on, and tell us more about these magical two characters, Orbus Billie and Spike, and their fantastic 'lesbian' (is that the right word for sex between a woman and a female robot?)  love affair.  That's the bit where the book really takes fire; it's written with passion and pain and honesty, and then it stops, and clever satirical stuff takes over.  Much of this clever satirical stuff is very good; but it never feels true in quite the same way.

Also, by switching narrative horses so radically, Winterson lumbers herself with a major practical problem; having created one vivid world, on Orbus, she now has to create a second and radically different post World War 3 world, on Earth. That's possible; but to do justice to her Post-3 War world she needs more time, more pages, more words. Instead, she pours the exposition on like gravy on turkey.  And the subtle delicacy of her style is lost entirely.

It's still a very good book though, and I hope to give it a second read. As a final note, I should just say that the designer of the cover is an artist in her or his own right; it's beautiful and, if you look closely, it is also a superbly apt commentary on the novel's content.

On Magdalen Nabb

Everyone has  their favourite country for holidays....mine is Italy.  I've been to Lake Garda, Umbria, Tuscany, Florence, Lake Garda again, Florence again, and of course Rome. This year I went to Crete which looks a little bit like Italy, and once again I pursued my favourite holiday pastime - reading detective novels set in Italy whilst actually being in Italy. (Or in Crete - my mind is very easily fooled.) And the key holiday texts for me are the novels of Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin (author of the Aurelio Zen mysteries) and the great and under-appreciated Magdalen Nabb.  Nabb's unlikely hero Marshal Guarnaccia is a carabinieri officer with poor deductive powers, very little social self-confidence, who is absent-minded to the point of rudeness, and who essentially muddles his way through every case aided by his astonishing memory, his instinct for people, and his passion for truth.  He is like Columbo, but less suave. (!)

Nabb's books are stylishly written, understated, and rich in emotion and truth.  She evokes an Italy of forests and feuds and bitter neighbourhood disputes; almost every chapter features the Marshal having a long boozy lunch and sleepwalking his way through the afternoon's amiable interviews.  As who-dun-its, they wouldn't feature on anyone's Top Ten list; but as evocative studies of the queerness of folk, they are unique and special .

Years ago there was a TV adaptation of one of the novels, which misfired really because of the incongruity of English thesps playing Italian characters.  And after that, there was a period when the Marshal books seemed to go out of print - although that was no handicap really, since like all lovers of detective fiction I'm devoted to second hand bookshops and was always able to obtain my fix. 

Sadly, Magdalen Nabb has just died,  in Florence, on the 18th of August.  Her final novel Vita Nuova will be published in 2008, after which there will be no more Marshall Guarnaccia mysteries. 

I will miss him, and her.