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!

On Debatable Space

As the New Year begins, I'm looking forward to an intense and exhilarating writing schedule, with a new 2-book deal from Orbit which means, um, I have to write another couple of books. 

What's more, my already-completed third book Version 43 will be coming out this autumn, or in the 'Fall' as our American cousins quaintly like to say.  After that,  the next book  out will be a massively violent space opera called Hellship. After that will be - well I'm working on an idea, but it's still at early stages. Watch this space. 

Since I'm writing this on New Year's Eve I'm naturally thinking back a little bit, about my previous  two novels Debatable Space and Red Claw and how I came to write them.  (Where do you get your ideas, Palmer?)

I think in all honesty I'm often inspired by images.  The idea for Debatable Space came when I was in the Science Museum in London, standing underneath a rocket that flew to the Moon. The idea for Red Claw came in a butterfly zoo, when I was surrounded  by hundreds of those beautiful amazing creatures and thought, wouldn't it be great if these creatures were huge nasty monsters and could FIGHT each other?  (No, actually I thought about the wonder of nature - but Red Claw is, I must concede, a bloodbath of a book.)

Anyway, enough words. Here, for the next few days, are a collection of images that inspired each of these books.

And I'm starting off with Debatable Space, my first SF novel, which will always be the book closest to my heart.

Here are two galaxies merging...the wonder of space!

And here's an asteroid striking the Earth (artist's impression). Such shit happens a lot in Debatable Space.

This is an actual image of the flare from a neutron stare lighting up the Earth's atmosphere. Hey, I must have missed it...

This is Galileo above the Earth.

And this is Captain Jack Sparrow. The simple idea of Debatable Space was - Pirates, in Space!

And this is a kick-ass SF movie that lit my fire.

My spaceship is old and battered, and has sails (to catch the solar wind...)

And here's another beautiful image from space (of the Cartwheel Galaxy).

This is a Pierson's Puppeteer, which appears in Larry Niven's Ringworld, a big influence.

This is science fiction being silly, which I love.

Joss Whedon, cool people, great dialogue - what's not to be influenced by?

And did I mention Willow?

This is Buffy with a big book. It amuses me.

This is the book wot I wrote.

This is pulp SF at its pulpiest.

And this is an Isaac Asimov cover by Peter Elson.

All  images of space courtesy of NASA.

Finally, the sexy aliens…

I've written a new Orbit post about one of my favourite subjects - aliens.  Take a look here.

This post prompted ace webguy Darren Turpin to send me a link to this fabulous story.

On the Predator Pack

I've been blogging on the Orbit site about evil, and it came as something as a shock to me to realise quite how dark is my own soul.

In real life, I'm pretty cheerful, and inclined to look on the bright side of things.  My glass is always half-full, not half-empty; though, if it's a Friday night, not for long.   And a lot of the stuff I write tends to have a lot of humour - and indeed downright silliness - in it. 

But there is, in my underlying assumptions, a dark cynicism about humankind.

Not all humans - just some.  The pack leader humans.   The policitians, financiers, arms dealers, drug barons, gang bosses.  I accept there are great differences between each of those groups - though if you had a choice between sending a drug dealer to jail for a year, or a senior banker, which would you choose?   But these are Alpha People - many of them Alpha Males,  though not all - and I hate them.

I hate them because they are predators, in a society which cries out for less predation, more cooperation.  Sometimes they are posh twits, who have inherited all their money and power; sometime they earn their dosh and power the hard way. 

But even the posh twits are smart.  They know how to protect their own position, to cling on to power. And so we have a wickedly divided society rife with injustice, and beset with crises - the near-collapse of the financial system, global warming, and an expansionist war of dubious legality in Iraq in which we, the British and American peoples, have been forced to be complicit.

Wow. Lighten up Phil!

Of course, most of the time I write fun stories in the hope that others will think they are fun  to read, or hear, or watch.  I've written dark political thrillers for radio - including one richly-researched piece on military interrogation, and another piece on industrial disasters.  But even those 'polemical' plays are full of humour, with characters who engage with each other, and hopefully engage the audience.

I wrote a gruelling piece about a psychophatic murderer for BBC Television; but though based on truth it was, at the end of the day a thriller - and hence, meant to entertain.

Writers are part of the showbiz world - we're not here to preach, or to spread doom and gloom.

Nonetheless, my life experiences, and my readings of history, have left me with the conviction that, if the predatory pack leaders get to lead, there is no limit to the horrors of which humans are capable.

And that's why, in Debatable Space,  I have the Cheo presiding over an empire of evil in which all the human species are embroiled, and hence complicit. I don't think - as some have suggested - that the people of the future will be more evil than we are.  But they will be just as easily led.  The great thing with technology is that it makes the job of the evil dictator easier than ever before; and so, in my far future dystopia, it only takes one evil man to stain with evil all of humanity.

In Red Claw, I expand on this concept.  If you are born into an evil empire, will you challenge it, or just accept it as 'the way things are?' In my nasty future, most people go along with it.  They are taught, as children, that this is what you must and must not do.  And if they rebel, as young adults, they will regret it briefly, before 'vanishing'. 

This is the story of the Hitler Youth, projected into a future universe.

Some readers have questioned the credibility of the main premise of Red Claw - this isn't a spoiler by the way , it's stated fairly clearly from the outset - namely that the humans on this alien planet intend to terraform it, killing all indigenous life. 

That, I concede, is a terrible thing to do. But unlikely?

I think not.  If humans want to colonise space they have to find planets which are a) Earthlike in every respect with an oxygen-rich atmosphere or  b) similar to Earth in terms of size and distance from the sun, and with water in abundance,  in order to be readily terraformable. 

Perhaps really nice humans would choose to terraform barren planets like Mars - or gas giants like Jupiter.  But it would be easier, and more economic, to colonise the planets which are colonisable.

And which therefore are almost certain to already have life.

This is the unstated but omni-present assumption of my Future History; given a choice between the easy way and the hard way, humans will always choose the easy way.

Or at least, they will if they are led by predator pack leaders. 

Bankers are a classic example of predator pack leaders.  All political commentators agree that the astonishing and imbecilic and utterly selfish behaviour of bankers in the US and UK and around the world is the product of 'group think' - the tendency of tightly-knit groups of people to become so obsessed with agreeing with each other that they lose sight of reality.  But I prefer to think of it as 'pack think' - the pack thinks only of itself, and its own welfare.  And, frankly, the banker pack are doing very nicely.

George Bush was also a predator pack leader.  He didn't get himself elected to the post of President - he was helped to power by a cabal of powerful people, many of them Texan oilmen.  And he did his best, throughout his Presidency, to protect the interests of his pack.  And in that - though in nothing else - he succeeded triumphantly.

I wrote Debatable Space out of rage at the Bush years; I wrote Red Claw out of rage at unfettered predator capitalism.  So be warned: these are dark dystopian visions from a man with a lot of rage.

But also - fun. Writing is fun, reading is fun; it's the rest of life that's scary as shit.

That Ariel Magic

Star blogger Ariel, aka Darren Turpin the marketing wizard at Orbit, has now given this website a revamp...check out The Books section and see what happens when you click those covers.

On Red Claw

Red Claw,  my follow up to Debatable Space, is now on its way to a bookshop near you....well actually, not till later this year (October I believe).  But there's an account of the book on the Orbit website written by someone even crazier than I am...

Red Claw is very like Debatable Space, except for the fact that it's completely different in every respect. It's not set in space, it doesn't have antimatter bombs and black holes, or space battles, or Flanagan and Lena.  What it does have aliens. Many many aliens.  Very very very many aliens. And Doppelganger Robots. 

With this book, I set out to write a reflective, analytical study of scientific method and the joy of discovery. 

Then I thought, what the hell! and wrote Red Claw, which is a reflective, analytical study of scientific method and the joy of discovery combined with relentless KICK-ASS ACTION and a ticking clock narrative in which the end of the world is increasingly, and alarmingly, nigh. 

Check out the cover too. This was the subject of great debate between myself and the Orbit guys and (in my opinion!) what they've come up with is wildly audacious and vivid.  It evokes all those SF pulp covers I used to love so much, but in a very modern way.  The toy spacemen, by the way, were borrowed from the extensive collection of toy action figures that I keep in my attic, next to my Airfix spaceships  (sigh...I'm so sad.)

I hope to publish an excerpt from the book on this site in due course; watch this space.

On the AFM

It's now two weeks since I returned from the AFM (American Film Market), and I'm only just returning to reality.

It is, I concede, a curious hobby for a science fiction novelist - being a film producer, going to Film Festivals, and pitching movies.  But producing is something I started to do before the Debatable Space book deal. And it's a phase in my career that emerged quite naturally being a screenwriter;  because when I worked in television I was also involved in script development and creative producing, as well as working as a head of development and head of drama of a small indie company.

And so these days, when I write a screenplay, rather than waiting around for producers to snap it up and steal all the fun, I tend to actively market the project myself. My company Afan Films has a small slate of projects, most written by me, but also including a wonderful and highly commecial family movie called The Big Bad by Emma Adams (already part-financed).

Until now, however, my film producing activities have been confined to meetings in London, and trips to the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals.  The trip to the AFM was an attempt to break into the largest and most powerful market for movies in the world - Hollywood! 

And oh boy, what a nerve-wracking, and exhilarating, and amazing experience it turned out to be.

The key to all such movie pitching events is planning; and in my case the work began in July of this year, when I recruited an Associate Producer aka Guy Who is Smarter Than Me At Such Things based in the US.   His name is Jay - hi Jay! - and he's a New York/Maine writer/producer/director/ web producer/man-of-many-hyphens.  We connected over Debatable Space - he sent me an email to say how much he'd enjoyed reading it back in January - and we've been planning this US trip for about five months.

Step 2 was getting organised. I am not, as my wife will tell you, at the drop of a hat, or even without the hat-drop, the world's most organised person.  I often turn up on holidays without shirts or underpants.  I rarely organise family trips, I never know where my passport is, and I have so little sense of direction, I often get lost in my own street.

But to go to the American Film Market - possibly the largest and busiest market for feature films in the world - ferocious organisation is required. So I had check lists, I had files, I had folders, both paper and electronic.  And as the rest of my life turned to rack and ruin due to my inability to open letters from the bank marked URGENT, in this one small area of my existence, total efficiency ruled.

The next stage was the Cold Calling.  This was somewhat tricky for me - because writers and producers who have an LA agent would expect to get all their meetings arranged for them.  However, although I have two superb and unsurpassable British agents - one for books (hi John!) and one for drama (hi Meg!) I don't yet have an agent in the States. So, I realised, there was no dignified way of doing this thing.  I had to just pick up the phone and call.

And there  is, I learned, an art to Cold Calling Hollywood.  You have to be persistent. You have to be shameless. You have to be nice. And you have to schmooze.

To my relief, Jay ended up doing the lion's share of the cold-calling; but when his day job became a monster, it was up to me to finish up organising the meetings. At 6pm every weekday, I picked up the phone...and transformed myself from being Taciturn Writer Person with No Social Skills to being Smooth Talking Movie Guy.

And overall, we did amazingly well. We got meetings with major Hollywood companies, we got scripts sent across, after signing Hollywood Release Forms, we fixed up an encounter with a leading Canadian entertainment lawyer, and we got a cluster of meetings at the AFM itself with British and American producers, sales agents and distributors. I also sold two mobile phone contracts and a free holiday in Bahamas, but I think I was a bit crazed that day, and I hope those guys never get back to me.

Next stage was Assembling the Crew. (You'll appreciate, of course, that I was treating this like a heist movie; but fortunately, we never got to the Double Cross bit....)  Once I got to LA, my Crew was both virtual and real.  I had my agents back in Blighty, responding to my increasingly crazed emails, together with Carlo, a bona fide film producer who gives me calm and wise advice on all matters difficult, and there was my Board - hi guys! - the really quite distinguished business people who hold Afan Films together.

But first and last, in my 'real' world, there was Jay.  Jay, for reasons best known to himself, had rented a black station wagon that was undeniably the least cool vehicle on the LA freeway.  We christened it the Bluesmobile, and toyed with the idea of wearing black suits and dark glasses and pretending we were the Blues Brothers. Tragically, however, neither of us was tall enough or lean enough to pass for Elwood; so we both had to be Jake Blues.

Next came the Briefing.  I had come, as I have explained, and to my wife's total astonishment, extremely well prepared. (Shirts! Underpants! Files!) But Jay was uber-prepared. He had spread sheets and colour charts, he had a laptop with a powerpoint presentation, he even had a talking GPS who we christened Doris to get us to those vital meetings. (Since Jay, too, turned out to have a pitiful sense of direction. Is this a writer thing?) 

I'd suggested that we should hold our briefing session in a chic LA bar where we could hob nob with famous movie directors and movie stars and possibly make eye contact with Halle or Nicole or Brad or Angelina.  Jay sadly misheard, or misunderstood, or probably wasn't even listening to me in the first place; so we ended up in a Boston Irish Red Sox bar off Santa Monica Boulevard, where we found ourselves in a the midst of an amazingly raucous karaoke session. (The highlight was that fabulous girl who sang 'Whole Lotta Love'.) 

I loved it there, of course - that's what I call a bar. And by this point, I was beginning to realise a profound truth about myself; that even in the midst of Hollywood glamour, I am essentially still just a Welsh bloke who likes a pint.

The next day, we Cased the Joint.  The American Film Market isn't actually in Hollywood, it's in nearby Santa Monica, a stunningly beautiful beach resort which has a famous fun fair with illuminated ferris wheel.  And the Market is spread between two high-class hotels, Loews and Le Merigot.  When we entered Loews, we found ourselves engulfed in ultra-cool hubbub.  Unknown film directors were being interviewed, meetings were being held in corners, guys with badges saying FOX or WARNERS were being followed Closeau-style by bug-eyed wannabee producers. An American guy strolled across, befriended us instantly, and told us about his slate of horror movies, then introduced us to his co-producer who owned the rights to a classic soul song written by his dad. Gorgeous young women in halter tops handed out fliers for the movies they had helped to produce; angry men in suits stomped down the boulevard snarling into their Blackberries.

Film Festivals are places of anarchy and chaos where buyers (film distributors, who put movies on in cinemas) haggle with sellers (sales agents, who sell completed movies on behalf of producers) whilst surrounded by a whirling swarm of desperate aspirant film-makers anxious to squeeze money or deals out of unwitting big-shots.

Each floor of the hotel was flanked with booths where bored looking assistants sat in front of often graphic and outrageous movie posters, fending off the desperate wannabees in the hope of, from time to time, encountering an actual Buyer.  And all the luxury suites had been converted into offices where the richer sales agents plied their wares. 

Jay and I had one conversation with a glamorous distributor's assistant who had set her office up in the bathroom of her company's luxury suite; her laptop was on the basin surface, next to jars of moisturiser and Dead Sea skin balms. 

Some of the most urgent meetings took place next to the Loews Hotel pool; deals were haggled and re-haggled in a constant buzz of energy, as hotel guests swam lazily up and down in the actual water.

And finally, once we had Cased the Joint, the work began.  We started to Pitch.

Pitching is addictive.  It's a strange way of talking to people - you bend over backwards to be calm, relaxed, chatty, witty, not desperate, not anxious,  not sweaty; you will yourself to be full of savoir faire and sang froid and other such French things, and all the while you are thinking FUND MY DAMNED MOVIE. 

We spent two days pitching in the market; then two days pitching to actual Hollywood companies in their offices.  We met a fabulous and powerful guy who raises money for movies from corporate sponsors - a dashingly handsome man dressed in a black Oscar Pomeroy suit and a matching Oscar Pomeroy tie, and a black beard flecked with grey, who admitted that Rupert Murdoch calls him the Prince of Darkness - and managed to persuade him to read our script.  (He did; he liked it; and if and when we get a US distributor, he may raise several million dollars to help us make the film - so, Prince of Darkness, blessings to you!) We met the President of a major LA company which has helped make some of the most spectacular movies of recent years, including The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Golden Compass. We pitched to a charming story editor in the offices of Dean Devlin, producer of Independence Day - and, forgive me bragging here, but this really is the highlight of my producing career to date - we not only saw Dean Devlin enter the office and stand almost quite near us, but we actually saw the valet parking guy park Dean's car.

(That little story makes me sound rather sad, doesn't it? Damn!) 

A further highlight was pitching to the company who made Predator - they actually keep the ten foot high model of Predator himself in the lobby, to scare their guests.

At some point in this whirl, I encountered Jay's friend Rob, who - coolest of things - makes promos for one of my favourite TV shows, The Shield.  We went to see Rob at his editing suite in the Fox headquarters, and were able to have a tour of the Fox lot - acres and acres of offices and studios, featuring a perfect replica of several New York streets.  Every stage/studio is painted with a mural - so there's the Simpson's Studio, and there's the Star Wars Studio, and so on - and yes, executives do actually drive from building to building on golf buggies.

On the last night, Rob took Jay and myself on a guided tour of Los Angeles, and we saw everywhere. The street where O.J. Simpson didn't, according to the jury, do the thing he was accused of doing. The Viper Rooms.  The hotel where James Belushi died. And, the absolute highlight of the trip, the moment when the car came screeching to a halt and Rob said, 'You must see this!' was -

- by the way I have to explain at this point that both Jay and Rob and uber-nerds. Really, they are very very nerdy indeed. I am virtually not nerdy at all next to these guys.  We spent an hour one night looking at photos of J.J. Abrams design for the new Starship Enterprise on Rob's iPhone. (Way cool!) So, with that bit of vital backstory in place, I can now explain that we saw -

This:

Isn't that just amazing? Isn't that the  most...

What? What do you mean what's amazing? Can you not see?

Ignore those two guys in the front. (The tall one is Rob, the other is Jake, harumph, Jay.)  But behind them. That black thing. See it now.

It's the original Batmobile.  And it lives in a car showroom somewhere in LA, I have no idea where (I told you I have no sense of direction.)  The walls of the showroom are covered in movie posters; they specialise in stocking cars that have been used in movies and TV shows; and they do actually have the original Batmobile.

Here, for a closer look of the Bat-vehicle, see this pic (and do ignore that guy on the left, he's very weird, and he follows me around everywhere):

A few ruminations.

Why do I make my life so complicated? Most writers just write.  They stay at home all day.  They watch Ironside in the afternoons.  They emerge, blinking into the light, to meet their editor or agent from time to time; and such a life has a real appeal for me.

However, if you love movies, you have to hustle. It's the only way to do it.  You have to meet people, go to Festivals, be around.  And the truth is, I not only love movies, I love the buzz that producing movies gives.  It's the nearest I get to living dangerously - I'm responsible for making things happen. I have to persuade people to give me money, I have to build creative teams, and know how to get the best out of them. And I get to be a Player, in however small a way.

That's one reason; the other reason, of course, is that I have movie projects I love, in genres that I love, and I want to see them made.  

And I don't just want to see them made - I want to be part of the whole process, from fund-raising to casting to being on the set and actually knowing what's happening. When I worked as a regular writer on The Bill - which in many ways was one of the best times in my career - I used to get hugely frustrated at being so far away from the fun  bits. I'd write a script, drive to the office, drive home,  drive back for a script meeting, drive home; and then the danged thing would pop up on the telly.  Admittedly, I would generally try and turn up at the set for an hour or so when my eps were filming - when I would always be in the way and not know what to do. But otherwise, the camaraderie of film-making, the adrenalin-rush of film-making, the sheer joy of film-making - I knew none of that. 

Writers often miss these best bits of it when it comes to film and television drama.  It's about belonging.  And I'm determined not to miss out again.

In radio,  however, the process is very different - with every radio play I've ever written, I've been in rehearsals, I've been present for every minute of the recording process, I've got to know the actors - I have been part of it. And I absolutely love the moment when the script becomes real; when the actors make the words flesh. 

With novels, it's different again; for there is no 'part of it'.  There's the joy of writing it; the pleasure of having lunch with your editor (hi Tim!), or your marketing executive (hi George! hi Sam!) or your agent (hi John!) But the actual process of making a book - typesetting, printing, driving the books in vans to the bookshops, selling the books - these things are all, let's face it, awfully boring.  That is an "it" of which I do not want to be part.

But as a film producer - the kind of film producer who helps to raise the money, but doesn't spend all his time on the set - I get to be part of a magical buzz.  And - damn it all - two weeks after coming back  from Hollywood - I miss it.

Concept Sci Fi

I was recently interviewed by Gary Reynolds, over at Concept Sci Fi. It's a beautifully designed site, full of great content, and has a special feature on how writers write. 

To read the interview, which consists of me rabbitting on at great length (try shutting me up!), click round about here.

TX: It Came From Outer Space

This week has turned into something of a perfect storm for me - one of those freak moments when many events coincide to create a whole larger than the parts -  though, I hasten to add, in a good way, not in a smashing-up-ships actual storm way.

Firstly, I've just emerged blinking from the studio at BBC Broadcasting House, where my radio adaptation of Tayeb Salih's classic novel Season of Migration to the North has (almost!) completed recording.  This is my first Radio 3 project, and it's been very exhilarating - I'll write more about it when I get my daylight eyes back. 

And also, this week, Debatable Space continues to be the SF/fantasy/horror Book of the Month in Waterstone's.  Sales are brisk I'm told, and, the telling detail here, the books are £2 cheaper  than they will be on the 1st September. 

And on top of all this, I've discovered (rather belatedly, since I haven't had time to read the Radio Times) I have an episode of Heartbeat being broadcast this Sunday, 31st August.  This is the first ever science fiction episode of Heartbeat; and, buoyed up by my success in selling this notion, I'm now pitching a proposal to the BBC about an an alien family that moves in to Albert Square.  (They will be squat and bald-headed and will talk in an eerie whisper - ah, you guessed it! Phil Mitchell was part of the advance party of the alien invasion!) 

Next week things go back to normal.  I'll spend my time worrying about being late with my deadlines,  no one will phone me, and my emails will all be spam or virus threats.  But for these few days, it's nice to savour the adrenalin-rush that comes from having a show in post-production, and a show on the telly, and a book in the shops, all at the same time. 

Waterstone’s in Sheffield

This in from my spies in Sheffield...

The Waterstone's blurb is 'Imagine Firefly rewritten by Iain M. Banks', which I rather like....

The Bookseller Crow on the Hill

Hurrah! Signed copies of the mass market edition of Debatable Space are now available from my local bookshop, the adorably named The Bookseller Crow on the Hill.  Mr Crow was delighted at the brisk trade he did in internet sales of the large format edition, via this site.  And he's now acquired a pleasingly large stack of the little beasties, which are available at the discount rate of £7.19.

On Debatable Space

It's been a good year for Debatable Space,  and indeed for me. I've been delighted at the many nice responses I've had from SF fans.  And I've also been thrilled at the reaction from friends who aren't SF fans who have loved the book, and said nice things about it,  and, most importantly, let's face it, cutting out the wishy-washy mimsy euphemstic shilly-shallying, have bought the book.

In fact, I had a meeting this week with a producer who had (accidentally) bought two copies of the book from Amazon.  That's the way to do it! Buy more!  If you need something to go under that wobbly table leg, buy Debatable Space! It'll do the job nicely.

Oops, okay, sorry, I went off the rails a bit there.  That's writers for you.  We want to be loved, we want to be creatively fufilled, but most of all, we want to have our books bought. 

Sad, I know. 

Anyway,  continuing this theme, of books being bought, I'm delighted to say that Debatable Space has been re-born (or rejuved?) in its new format mass market edition. 

The cover is very subtly different, it's smaller, it's got a nice quote from Eric Brown on the front, and an interview with me in the back.  But basically, I have to admit, it's exactly the same. So, damn it, if you already have a copy of Debatable Space, there's really no point you buying this new version. Don't bother. It's okay. I shan't be offended!

The new and smaller (and just as enjoyable (I hope!)) Debatable Space is published on the 7th August, which is next week isn't it? (I have trouble keeping track of time (there, another unnecessary bracket!) these days).  Available in all good book stores, including and especially Waterstone's, who have been wonderfully supportive of the book, and have,  ahem, sold copies of it.

And for those who haven't read it yet, but plan to do so - I hope you find it a strange but satisfying journey into a weird imaginative place.   

On the Future of Batteries

I'm reading Charles Stross' Halting State at the moment, which is a gripping and tautly written piece,  and full of wonderful extrapolations about the future.  (It starts with a virtual bank robbery, and gets stranger from there.)

I've met Charlie at a couple of conventions - he's a very likable, charismatic, larger than life guy, of astonishing fluency and cleverness.  And I also saw him talk at Easter Con on his vision of the future - not about his SF per se, but his more general thoughts on what he guesses will happen in technology and science. 

This is very much Charlie's area of expertise - he's a computer guy as well as a science guy. And he's absolutely on the ball about the kind of technology that's about to hit us - from quantum computing to 'smart spectacles' (which allow us to see the world and the virtual world of computer info or games simultaneously.  Think of Arnie in Terminator with his computer screen POV; that'll be all of us in just a few years.)

At Easter Con, Charlie also spoke fascinatingly about the 'plateau' effect that's affected a number of major technological developments. Because in the 1940s and 50s, many sensible speculators assumed that by the twenty first century there'd be men on the Moon, and men on Mars and a Moon colony, and maybe even starships, as well as flying cars and suchlike.  Well, man did reach the Moon in the 1960s; but none of the rest has come true. And this is because it all costs so much. A graph representing the limits of the possible would shoot up in an almost vertical line; but a graph of the limits of the affordable would be a horrible, boring flat line.  Progress goes so far at Fast; then it slows down.

In computing, by contrast, Moore's Law applies - the rule that says that the number of transistors than can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years.  This is not really a Law of course - it's just the way it's been up till now.  And it explains why computers are getting smaller, and more powerful, and yet also cheaper...!   And it explains too why we are now living in a world in which science fiction seems to have come true - with Bluetooth, Wi-fi, mini-computers, and Nintendos that double as phones. (Have you seen those? They're so scary.) And yet - we don't have spaceships, we don't have teleportation, we don't even have very many electric cars. We are a twentieth century industrial society with twenty first century computing power.   

In other words,  computers have improved exponentially; every other dang thing is stuck on the plateau.

Charlie's view,  though, is that the same plateau effect may start happening in the world of computing - UNLESS quantum computing comes on line, in which case, who knows? 

But his thoughts on the future, in that talk and in Halting State, have made me think a little bit about my own vision of the future. 

That's assuming I have such a thing of course -  because the truth is, I wrote Debatable Space to be fun and entertaining and thought-provoking. I didn't sit down and spend months working out the science and the rules of the future history.  The story, and the characters, came first.

However, after writing DS, and revising it, and after working on Red Claw and Ketos, I've started to realise that my future universe depends on a number of key assumptions. 

And in a nutshell; in my future universe, there is no plateau effect.  Science progresses fast, and keeps progressing faster.  Many many planets are colonised.  Spaceships are huge and reliable and go very very fast.  Doppelganger Robots can be easily manufactured - whole armies of them if need be - and planets can be terraformed at extraordinary speed.  And in the Earth system, no one is poor, resources are limitless, and the Solar System even has its own lighting system so that it's constant day.

This is a far cry from the dystopian vision of much SF.  It's a world of plenty, and of endless resouces.  So how could that be possible?

In a word, batteries.

Yeah, I know, that last line was a ghastly belly flop.  If the word had been 'magic' or 'science' or if I'd used a phrase like 'the exaltation of the human spirit' it would have been much cooler. But batteries? How utterly nerdish is that? A future forged by Duracell?

Let me use another word then; energy.  As a planet and as a civilisation we are now experiencing a major energy crisis: oil and gas supplies are becoming depleted, nuclear fission energy is dirty and too expensive, nuclear fusion still isn't commercial, and 'green' energy sources are hard work. (And can be highly non-ecological - look at all those damned wind farms.)

In addition, of course, we're facing global warming because of the way we run our profligate industrial society. And it's by no means ridiculous to suppose that in 50 or 100 years we'll be experiencing climactic disasters on a global scale.

All this puts a terrific damper on scientific progress - apart from being, of course, awful in itself.   As SF readers we're all familiar with the amazing variety of new inventions that could and we hope will transform our lives - quantum computing (as mentioned above), nanotechnology,  robotic fabricators which can turn every home into a factory, quantum teleportation, etc etc etc. But none of this is much use if we can't turn the lights on.

So in the Debatable Space Universe, to make all the cool toys possible, I make a major supposition; I suppose that some clever spark has invented a battery (perhaps a development of SMES, superconducting magnetic energy storage, or a supercapacitor incorporating nanotechnology, or both) that is phenomenally efficient, small, and can hold vast amounts of energy in compressed form.  In Debatable Space these batteries are assumed; in the later books, I name them - I call them BBs, or B Bats. 

So let's assume we have a BB that is able to contain in compressed form as much energy as the Sun emits in a day, assuming also you have a vast solar panel in orbit around the Sun to capture that energy.  And when I say vast I mean vast - after all, no one is going to complain that it blocks their view.  The orbiting solar panel can be far enough away from the Sun that melting does not occur, but near enough that the full value of the Sun's heat is received.  And all that energy is then stored in the BB.

You then send a spaceship from the solar panel to the Earth carrying the BB; or you transmit the energy via laser beams to a satellite in orbit around the Earth,  if that's possible, though my science advisor let me get away with it; or you find some other mechanism. But essentially, once you have you have lots of batteries all full of huge amounts of power, the energy needs of the world are over.  You can use the BB to power factories to build spaceships to collect more BBs.  You can use BBs to power robot miners to hew metals out of the asteroids.  BBs power the robot fabricators; BBs run our homes, so we don't need a National Grid.

You'll notice this above account is a little short on maths and engineering data and diagrams of solar panels in orbit. I adore writers like Asimov and Clarke and Greg Bear (and, indeed, Alastair Reynolds) who can back up their extrapolations with heavy duty science.  That's not something I can do, not off the top of my head anyway; and it's not where my focus is.

My point is simply this; this one invention makes everything else possible.  The sheer lunacy of the British government's policy in promoting nuclear power (because it makes a loss! it fails on its own terms) is an indication of how inward-looking our policy of seeking out energy sources is.  We use oil and gas - which are the remains of carbon forests, but which ultimately constitute an organic stored form of the energy of the sun.  And we split the atom, to generate energy. And we dream of clean and cold nuclear fusion, which allows us to replicate on Earth the process by which energy is generated in the Sun.

But why not just cut out the middleman - go to the Sun. If we had materials strong enough, we could fire solar panels into the Sun itself.  Our entire planet - our forests and trees and plants and hence our animals - is fuelled by the energy from the Sun which, let's face it, is way far away. But this is a tiny proportion of the energy the Sun spews out every day.

And once you have space travel - there are the stars.  Every single star is a burning mass of energy; and if you take a look at how many stars there are even in our tiny bit of the Galaxy, and how many other Galaxies there are, the mind starts to swim.  Even the human race couldn't use up all that power.

The Universe of Debatable Space is therefore based on three assumptions.  1) That instantaneous space travel is possible by a combination of virtual technology and quantum entanglement.  2) That a new kind of battery makes energy virtually limitless.  3) That humanity continues to screw things up, big time.

Because the universe of Debatable Space is no Utopia, it's no rosy-eyed vision of a world where no one wants for anything. It's a nasty ruthless universe, where limitless resources are distributed in the most appallingly unfair way possible. That's the drama and the ultimate source of jeopardy in these stories; that's the war that Flanagan and Lena fight.

But it's taken me three books to realise that I am essentially an optimist about the possibilities of scientific progress. I don't believe there will be a plateau; I think we'll either blow ourselves up, or we'll spread through the galaxy with gadgets galore. 

And I also believe that even global warming will have a technological solution.  The solution may come too late - the crisis is imminent, as almost all commentators now agree. And the solution may be undesirable; is it morally right to solve the problems caused by technology by using more technology?

 Well, maybe not; but I still think it will happen. Because scientists are smart, and science is powerful; and if it can be done, we will do it. (Or rather, others will - I'll still be writing SF.)

With great power comes great responsibility, as Peter Parker is told, rather too often.  So if at some future date - when? I have no idea? - our energy crisis is solved,  that doesn't solve all our problems. Far from it. 

But it would be nice if all the other things I predict in Debatable Space - tyranny, oppression, brutality, genocide - don't come true.  It would be nice if the human race were better, and wiser, than that. 

Let's hope...

Meet the Author?

I'm thrilled to say that today (Sunday March 23rd) Debatable Space is Book of the Day on the Meet the Author site. 

And after today, if you google me you'll see a clip of my interview in which I say various things.

Don’t Give up the Day Job, Phil

There's a great site called Meet the Author in which you can watch clips of your favourite writers talking about their books.  It features Gregory Maguire singing the title of his new book, Son of  a Witch; and among the SF writers, my favourite clip features a barnstorming performance from Iain M. Banks.

I went along on Friday of last week to do my own 'piece to camera'.   Strangely, I wasn't too nervous, largely because these days I never have time to get nervous (I used to spend days, nay weeks, getting nervous about things! Ah, happy times.) 

And, though I'd mentally prepared a few things to say, I hadn't managed to write anything down. I thought, what the hell, I'll busk it. And, to my own considerable surprise, I began calmly, and spoke fluently, and didn't forget anything I wanted to say when suddenly

 Nothing.

My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried'.

The very nice camera guy then explained I was way over length anyway - the ideal time for these things is 2 minutes, and I'd already passed the 6 minute mark, with footnotes and a prose poem sketch of my experiences running in Crystal Palace Park. So I gulped, resolved to be less verbose, and started again.

This time, I'm glad to say, I was far more economical. I got through about a minute and half's worth of chat effortlessly and then

Nothing.

My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried', for the second time.

This, have to say, is the moment when I realised when I could never be an actor.  It's not just that I don't look right, and I can't act, and I get embarrassed in public, though those are major handicaps. It's my brain. It doesn't remember the end of things. 

     To be or not to be, that is the

Um? What comes next?

That would be me.

Interestingly, the art of classical rhetoric was very much concerned with the art of memory. Greek orators used to memorise their speeches by associating each section with their living room, as part of a visual mnemonic system. You start with the door, move across to the sofa; and when you reach the main part or 'focus' of your argument, you're at the fireplace. (The word 'focus' comes from the Greek word for 'hearth', for precisely this reason.)

I've never learned any such rhetorical tricks; I relied on luck to get my through, and luck failed me miserably.

By this point, furious and battle-scarred, I wanted to start the whole thing again; but the camera guy just got me to carry on from where I'd stopped.  His plan is to edit it together seamlessly, but I'm convinced you'll be able to see a few seconds of dead air, and a panic-stricken writer with a fish-eye stare who has clearly had his data banks wiped.

In the interests of my own public mortification, I'll post a blog to say when the interview has gone online. 

On More is More

John Scalzi does an interesting feature in which he asks writers to talk about their 'Big Idea' - the guiding principle behind their writing.

I've had a stab at explaining my own Big Idea - which I call 'More is more'...if you want to check it out, click here.  

On the Debatable Space Launch Coffee

Yesterday was the official UK publication date for Debatable Space...friends kept asking if I was having a launch party, but somehow that never came together. So instead my wife took me up the Hill and we had a launch coffee in the local Cafe Nero.

New on this site: Ariel has resdesigned the format of the two extracts on the Books page.  He's modelled it on the Orbit extract page but decided to create an even better skull & crossbones....

And if you want to win a free copy of Debatable Space, click here.

On Selling Out

It's one more day till the official UK Launch Date of Debatable Space, but I was delighted to find that the early editions at my local bookshop, The Bookseller Crow on the Hill, have all been sold. Some went to friends and neighbours, but the last book was sold to a reader of this blog based in Lancashire, who followed the link to Crow.

I'm a great believer in the value of local bookshops, and I love the fact that thanks to the wonders of the internet, my local bookshop can be your local bookshop too....

I've now signed a new batch of copies, so if you want a signed edition from the first print run,  click here to order.   

Lena and Flanagan in Upper Norwood

The official UK publication date for Debatable Space is 24th January, but if you can't wait, there are some early copies available...My local bookshop The Bookseller Crow on the Hill, in Upper Norwood (aka Crystal Palace),  has ordered some copies for me to sign and they've been delivered early. Hot foot it to Crystal Palace immediately!  We also have great restaurants, and a wonderful park with life-size papier mache dinosaurs.  (That is actually true, though I admit it sounds like another of my lies.)

The book has been available in bookshops in the US since 7th Jan, so I guess that means I'm a published author.... 

Extract from Debatable Space

Click here to see what Orbit have done on their website; a long excerpt in a Debatable Space in a special e-format, and the coolest banner I've seen.  These guys have style. 

I'd love to publish the entire book like this - with colours and flash images.  And a real anti-matter bomb, concealed in a full stop, for the unwary reader.