Debatable Space
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
I've just returned from New York...and it was an exhausting and exhilarating experience. We saw a Broadway show (Legally Blonde, which is brilliant and witty, and not just a lazy musical-of-the movie), ate in delis, stared at the neon lights of Times Square, walked in Central Park, and marvelled at the blend of courtesy and sophistication and tackiness and appalling bloody rudeness which defines the New York experience. (Next time, I'll take a scimitar to deal with those dratted New York cyclists.)
Perhaps the most remarkable place we saw was M & M World on Broadway, an emporium devoted to the worship of, er, M & Ms. You can buy M & M T shirts, M & M leather jackets, and of course, M & Ms. This is, don't forget, the only confectionery in the world which has a rap artist named after it.
Holidays with a child are of course based around the barter system - in return for going to M & M World and the playground in Central Park my wife and I were allowed to visit the Guggenheim and MOMA.
We also managed a visit to a bookshop, somewhere between Greenwich Village and Little Italy. And I realised there's an interesting contrast between the way US publishers sell SF and the way we do it in Blighty. Bluntly, it's about money - it costs twice as much to buy a large format paperback in the US as it is to buy the mass market edition. Here, the differential is much less - Debatable Space is being sold for £10 in January, and it'll cost something like £7 if you wait till later in the year.
So don't wait! Can I be any less subtle! Buy it right away!!!
Ooops, sorry about that lapse of authorial decorum, I'll blame it on the jet-lag. In the aforementioned bookshop, I found the large format version of Jeff Somers' The Electric Church, a matt edition not a gloss edition, but still with that same stunning cover . That book has (as Jeff pointed out in his response to one of my blogs) an excerpt from Debatable Space at the back. And the US large format paperback has an excerpt from The Electric Church.
I met my editor Tim and his New York team for lunch, and they talked a little bit about this new publishing initiative. The choices of excerpt are carefully made, and it's intended to be a friendly recommendation, not just a plug. And the inclusion of author's interviews and essays is an attempt to give novels the equivalent of DVD Extras.
It's all part of a general attempt to keep the novel format abreast of or ahead of the pack, up there with movies and DVD box sets. Pundits once predicted that books would become obsolete; instead, there are more bookshops than ever, and they are cooler, nicer places to be.
And the decline of the hardback format is, in my view, part of this same general renaissance in novel publishing. Hardbacks are beautiful, but way too expensive. No one I know ever buys hardback novels; and the whole notion of massively promoting a format no one will buy, and not having money left to promote the paperback a year later, is surely a holdover from the ancient times of publishing. Now, you can buy a book when it's first published, when it's first reviewed, and when it's first promoted.
My current crisis, by the by, is that I've run out of places to put my books. I either need an attic extension, or a spooky derelict house at the end of my road which I can break into and use as a book repository for all those paperback books I keep buying...
Last night's Writer's Guild forum on fantasy and science fiction writing proved a great success. We had a full house of interested writers, many of them non-Guild members (there was a large contingent from the London Film School, where I'm a part-time lecturer.) And the panel debate was, I felt, though I'm biased of course, lively and very informative.
Ashley Pharaoh was there to talk about Life on Mars, and he showed a splendid clip which demonstrates the show's amazing stylistic range - from naturalism to surrealism to out and out verbal comedy. There was a stunning exchange between John Simm and Philip Glenister, in which Glenister's character splurges a smorsgabod of offensive homophobic terms.
Ashley thinks of the show as imaginative writing rather than 'sci fi' per se. And the chair for the evening, Edel Brosnan, described it as 'uncanny' writing which is a lovely word to use.
The point though is that this is a show which has challenged the stranglehold of social realism and police procedural in British television. It manages to be a great cop show - but it is also allowed to be weird, and strange, and philosophical, and thought-provoking.
And is it SF? On the basis of what happens in the final episode of the last series, I'd say yes; but the power of the show was always the way it made the ambiguity of its own reality a part of the story. Is this actually happening or is it just fantasy? And of course what we saw in the final ep may just have been another dream...! So I guess in many ways the show this is closest to is Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective - which was also a detective drama, and a mystery, but played beautifully with our ideas about what is real and what is imagined.
Phil Ford spoke about his experiences writing and script editing for shows like Dr Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Phil is a life-long science fiction devotee, who has suddenly discovered there's now a sweet shop in his living room.
I spoke about my experiences working as a development executive for Scottish Television, when I was told in no uncertain terms by senior ITV execs that they were never going to do SF, because it was stupid....! And audiences wouldn't like it! Phil nodded vigorously at this point; he had obviously heard the same comments many times, in the days before Russell T. Davies's Dr Who. Phil has spent a career in TV swimming against the tide; but now the tide has changed...
And Phil showed a clip of the Sarah Jane show - the wonderful Gorgon episode - which had us spellbound.
The third panellist, Adrian Hodges, co-creator of the bold dinosaur series Primeval, spoke about how he approaches the task of creating 'worlds'. Adrian has written a huge amount of historical drama, including the BBC's splendid life of Charles II. But Adrian is adamant that documentary realism is not possible or desirable for a dramatist; you have to create a world that's credible, and accurate in its essentials, but which is also accessible and resonant for a modern audience. And for him there's no real difference in approach between writing an historical drama, a literary adapatation (he wrote the movie version of Michael Hastings' Tom and Viv) and dinosaur dramas.
Adrian also wrote The Lost World; so dinosaur drama really is a genre he has made his own!
I spoke about SF and fantasy in novels, and read a short excerpt from Debatable Space, which seemed to be well received. The excerpt features a line in which Lena bemoans the fact that in her far future world some people have been bio-engineered so that their excrement emerges wrapped in polythene - to ensure that their shit does not smell.
How, Lena wails, can I stay sane, knowing a thing like that?
I'm delighted that the Writers Guild have organised this forum, because it really does mark a seachange in the way genres like SF are perceived by the 'mainstream' media. For years, SF has been treated as 'not posh' (a phrase one of the panellists used.) But now TV execs have woken up to the fact that SF has a loyal and discerning audience, and that it's a genre which offers different and exciting ways of telling a story. Different and exciting and, quite often, more imaginative ways.
However, Adrian did make the telling point that there was a time when TV audiences were very forgiving of wobbly sets and poor special effects - in the days of I, Claudius, and the early Dr Who. But after the movie Star Wars, TV audiences got pickier; so one reason SF has been off British TV for so long is that our companies literally couldn't afford to make big SF epics like Star Trek or Stargate.
But that's changing, as the cost of CGI comes down. And for my money, the production values of a show like Battlestar Galactica seem to me equal and at times superior to the values we'd expect from a feature film. (When the Vipers fly out of the mother ship, it always send a shudder of awe down my spine.)
And, in my view, the potential of SF on television has barely been tapped. So I'm looking forward to even more bold new shows in the next few years. A British Heroes? Why not?
But the secret for me about creating a show like Heroes is that you don't start by copying an existing show - you create something genuinely new! So pale imitation superhero series interest me not so much; I'd much rather see shows that come from somewhere fresh, and unexpected, and original.
(For an edited verbatim account of the debate, click here.)
I recently did a Q & A for the Book Swede - great fun. If you fancy reading it, then click here.
I'm reading the proofs for Debatable Space this week...a delightful but terrifying exercise. The story spans a thousand years, and features extraordinary events that are meant to be implausible and incredible, and yet should still be possible, just about.
Now I have to make sure that I haven't made dumb mistakes in the chronology and with the science. This, to my horror, involves writing an account (albeit a brief one) of everything that happens between AD 2004 (when my heroine Lena is born) and AD 3000 (Lena's Subjective Time - not Earth Time!) when there' s a great big kick-arse battle.
The sensible way to write a future history is to write one book; then write another book set twenty years later; then another book set twenty years later still. I have not done this sensible thing. I have started with an epic, and now I have to check that the Future History I have created that will stand the test of time....
For a writer, the two most beautiful words in the English language are these:
THE END
I've just come to the end of the first draft of my new novel, the follow up though not the sequel to Debatable Space. It's a thriller, a horror story, a family saga - and, damn it, I've got to the end of the damned thing!
Now it's on to the second draft....
Crime has been good to me over the years. One of my first and best jobs in television was as a script editor on the cult BBC series The Paradise Club, created by Murray Smith, starring Leslie Grantham and Don Henderson. It was a seedy London crime drama with shootings and heists and yakuza, set against a backdrop of deliciously improbable and larger than life characters. Murray was himself a larger than life character, who had served in the Foreign Legion and (so he claimed) had a close association with an SAS. As a member of a shooting club, Murray owned a gun, a formidable Sig Sauer which he once showed to me during a difficult script conference. He pointed it at me, smiled his evil smile, and even though I knew the gun was unloaded, I immediately modified my notes and told him what a great script it was – don't change a word, Murray!!!
After Paradise Club I worked for years as a regular writer on The Bill. Later I worked as a script editor on crime dramas like McCallum and Taggart, and wrote thrillers and noir film scripts. I spent a large part of one year hanging out with the West London murder squad, attending post mortems and drinking with coppers. I once spent an evening with an armed robber who had recently been abducted at gunpoint and hustled into the boot of a car, before being dumped on to the street in Glasgow. (I never had the courage to ask him why.) Another armed robber gave me a guided tour of all the banks and sports arenas he had armed robbed; only later did it occur to me that I would be appearing on the CCTV cameras loitering outside banks with a convicted blagger. 'Guv, who's that sinister looking Welsh bloke? Put him on the surveillance list…'
Then one day in the Science Museum, standing under a massive space rocket which hung from the ceiling, a vast phallic remnant of the days of space exploration, I had the germ of an idea that eventually evolved into Debatable Space. My aim was to write in a genre I love, with as much passion and bravura as I could muster. I wanted it to big, bold, and crazy (and in all honesty, I would say that it is.)
In writing Debatable Space, I became aware of the many differences between writing drama and writing prose – there are more words! Many many more words. (Actually, that really is the main difference. That, and the absence of producers, script editors and heads of drama all adding their wise and tactful insights to the evolving text.) I also experienced the joy of knowing that in telling this particular story, money was no object. This is a book with numerous space battles and bizarre aliens and black holes and flaring suns. If it were made as drama, it would cost the equivalent of 2,000,000,000 episodes of The Bill…
I also relished the freedom I felt I had to switch genres and styles, whenever the characters felt like a change. It's a book about slavery, and entrapment; but in writing it, I've never felt freer.
As well as being a book about evil, though, it's also a book about joy. One of my most truly joyful experiences in cinema was seeing the trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark as a young man. It evoked the wonder of childhood, impossible stories of derring-do, and had a retro nostalgic tang that was fabulously compelling.
Debatable Space is born of a similar impulse. With Raiders, Lucas and Spielberg set out to make a movie that was like the movies they watched as kids. And in similar fashion, I wanted to write a story that evokes the spirit of wonder and delight that I remembered from reading science fiction as a boy. I'd buy and read a half dozen novels a week, and when I didn't have money I'd stand in W.H. Smith and read the books that way. I'd borrow SF novels from my Uncle Bob, who had shelves and shelves of them in his motor repair garage. And I'd lose myself in strange worlds, from A.E. Van Vogt to Asimov's Foundation universe, to the Known Space of Larry Niven.
It was Niven's vision of weird, witty aliens and a morally conflicted hero that has most haunted my memories. The cowardly puppeteers, the furry Kzinti, the space yachts propelled by the solar wind…that was my starting point. But in the process of evolution, Debatable Space became more than just a rip roaring space opera. It become a biography, and a political allegory (evil rich humans controlling an empire by means of remote control technology – hel-lo?) and an ensemble show about a bunch of misfits bonded by humour and a mission.
But does that mean I'm now a science fiction writer? Well yes I am, and proud to be so. But a large part of me is an unrepentant genre-buster, with a love of mixing it up as much as possible. I love Blade Runner – a science fiction film noir. Alien, of course, is an SF horror movie. And The Matrix is a science fiction allegory of Jesus. Bring it on…!
Genre-busting is one of the most lively strands in modern SF, too. Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Alastair Reynolds do wonderful things in the world of SF noir. The astonishing Neil Gaiman gets his books on the SF shelves but, so far as I can gauge, manages to be a genre all of his own. And Peter F. Hamilton, one of my favourite SF writers, seems to be a Victorian novelist writing triple decker novels with rich, bravura characters, who also has a penchant for aliens and techno-talk. (And his Gregor Mandel novels are of a course a fine example of the busted genre of SF detective novel, following in the tradition of Asimov's Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.)
Casablanca was once described as a thriller, a love story, a political drama and a musical all rolled into one. And for me, one of the joys of SF is the freedom it offers to play with style and genre with complete abandon. Any story can be told in the SF genre, in any style, with any degree of political seriousness, or not, and with no limits on the degree of intellectual seriousness at work. So long as it's exciting, and extrapolative…it can be SF.
I worry, though, that after Debatable Space I will no longer be allowed to write in other genres without putting an extra 'M' in my name. But even so, after a writing career living on the proceeds of crime, it's a liberation to be a 'British SF author'.
To me, that's an invitation to have some serious fun...