Novel Writing
I found this hilarious and touching - it's Kate Elliott explaining where she got her 'Big Idea' for her Crossroads series, on John Scalzi's Whatever site.
Among the highlights of this piece is a wonderful evocation of a marriage which began with a double kill.
I haven't read Kate's work yet - but after reading this delightful blog-essay from her, I really have to...
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.
I'm off to Eastercon this weekend, for what promises to be a fabulous convention. Two of my favourite writers - Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee - are Guests of Honour - and I notice that the magnificent and prolific Charles Stross will also be attending. My agent John Jarrold, a veteran of Worldcons and Eastercons, will also be there. I'm new to the SF convention experience, but I expect to be a duck impacting water.
And in fact, from now on my year appears to be cluttered with festivals and conventions - I'm on a panel at Alt. Fiction in Derby, with the gifted Stephen Gallagher, and then in May I spend a week in Cannes, for the Film Festival.
And between those two events comes another great festival, which I would like to shamelessly pimp - the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. If you can get to London do check it out.
Now I need to find some time to actually write novels.
A while ago, I quoted Karen Miller's wonderful Book Swede Quote of the Week about the eating of elephants - her way of describing the process of how to write vast, panoramic, multi-character novels, by eating the elephant a bite at a time.
I love these wise words; and I've had reason to recall them while working on my own vast, panoramic, multi-character epic Ketos. The process of writing it has been fantastic, I've had wonderful responses to early drafts I've sent out to friends, but I'm way behind schedule.
Munch, munch.
This means, unfortunately, that Ketos is not going to ready for a 2008 slot as originally planned. But I'm glad to have more time to work on it and let it grow. And I reassure myself by reading the acknowledgements pages of other big books which were delivered late. Richard Morgan admits that the writing of Black Man took him past several deadlines; Neil Gaiman admits the same about American Gods. So I'm in good company.
I'm also aware of the terrific importance of editors in this whole writing process. I've worked with great editors and producers in television (Zanna Beswick and Archie Tait to name but two) and at Orbit, I'm lucky enough to have, in Tim Holman, an editor of great wisdom and rigour and, dash it all, he's very nice too. He loved Debatable Space and I always admired the fact that he never tried to tame it or make it more 'ordinary'. And he's been highly supportive of the various not-there-yet drafts of Ketos he's had to plough through (if you've never read a writer's rough draft, trust me, it can be a painful experience!) What's more, his notes have been insightful and superb. But I did take the hint when, in giving his notes on the last draft, he very kindly said, 'I'm confident this will be absolutely wonderful, Philip, when it's, um, finished.'
Oops.
So it's more work from Palmer on this one! In order to get it to the point where it looks as if it was written with no effort whatsoever. And, at Tim's savvy suggestion, I'm now multi-tasking, having started work on the book that was originally meant to come after Ketos. It's called Red Claw, it's a thriller, and an exploration of what it is to be a scientist, and I'm having the most wonderful time writing it.
The reason for doing two books at once is that, to be honest, it keeps both novels fresh. There usually comes a point in writing a novel or script when you get jaded, and have to put it aside for a week or two, or even a month or two, then go back to it when your brain is clear again and it all looks new and shiny, and the flaws are easy to spot. So this way, I can balance the downtimes of the two projects nicely; it's like being on a spaceship with two rockets.
Interesting, Lilith Saintcrow also uses this approach; her novels are published one at a time, but she admits that she wrote her first Dante Valentine stories almost simultaneously.
So next year, expect Red Claw and Ketos to start jostling for position in the bookshops.
Ideally, I'd love Red Claw to come out first, giving me a bit more time to bite chunks of elephantine Ketos.
And although, quite deliberately, I haven't attempted to write a trilogy, I do hope that together the three books will add up to more than the sum of their parts. They show different visions of the Cheo's universe, they span a range of styles from tragedy to comedy, and for all the similarities and shared content that will exist between them, they represent three different ways of writing a science fiction novel.
As readers of this blog will know, I love variety in writing - and I hope all three books will give readers a similar buzz, but will also stimulate with their quality of difference.
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 finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson.
I became intrigued about this book after reading a delightfully waspish review of it by Ursula K. Le Guin. Winterson had publicly stated that her novel - which features space travel and robots and takes place partly in the future - should emphatically not be regarded as 'science fiction'. This is a statement commonly made by literary novelists who write novels which are undeniably science fiction, but then decline to be associated with the hoi polloi SF writers who actually make a living in this genre.
And so, clearly niggled at Winterson's words, Le Guin performed a forensic dissection of the novel, analysing its story-telling flaws and its tendency to lapse into nakedly expository writing - with long chunks of what Le Guin refers to as 'As you know, Captain' dialogue, of the kind that seasoned SF writers try to avoid.
I'm a great fan of Le Guin; but also a great fan of Winterson. I haven't read her complete works, but I love what I have read. My favourite of her novels is her magic realist masterpiece The Passion, which is full of images that haunt the mind.
So I decided to make my own mind up. And, after reading the book, I came to an interesting conclusion. Winterson is right; this is not science fiction at all. It looks like SF, it has all the elements we commonly associate with SF but it's really a different genre of book entirely.
To explain what I mean by that, I have to define SF - which is easier said than done. I always get annoyed when commentators assume that SF has to be set in the future, or feature spaceships, or be obsessed with technology, or be devoid of satirical intent. SF is in fact a broad church genre. It ranges from space opera to personal drama, it can be set in the past or in an alternative present, it can be satirical and polemical, it can be character-based, it can be all manner of things.
But there are certain defining characteristics that make a novel SF. One of them, I would argue, is 'extrapolation', an imagining 'what if' process which takes aspects of the present and projects them into a different world (future, alternative present, or alternative past), in an exaggerated form. And in my afterword to Debatable Space I define SF as the genre in which extrapolation, speculation and imagination collide.
But another defining characteristic, I'd suggest, is that all SF has to be inspired by science. That doesn't mean it has to be crammed full of scientific facts and figures. It means that SF is fiction which absorbs and adores the scientific paradigm and zeitgeist. It finds the drama in scientific theories like quantum physics and relativity; it imagines the human consequences of scientific developments like spaceflight; and it speculates about what would happen if impossibilities like time travel were to become scientifically possible.
But it's the spirit of science that it is at the heart of SF. An SF novel can't have magic, because magic is the antithesis of science. And an SF narrative can't be illogical (or at least, it shouldn't be!) or self-contradictory. Because science depends on consistency of theory; even bewildering theories like quantum physics which allow a particle to be in two places at the same time make sense.
Winterson's novel, however, is a tale which makes no sense. I'm not referring to occasional errors and inaccuracies - all writers make such mistakes, and the copy editors can't hope to catch all of them. But at a fundamental, philosophical level, this novel doesn't make sense; and it isn't intended to make sense....That's not the game Winterson is playing.
To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the details of the plot; so if you haven't read it, BEWARE, PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW.
The Stone Gods is a novel made up of very different sections (like David Mitchell's excellent Cloud Atlas, which is partly science fiction, partly historical drama.) The first section tells the story of Billie, a rebellious woman living on the planet of Orbus. Almost all the inhabitants of Orbus are Fixed - they have fixed their genes so that they do not age. Billie, however, is defiantly unFixed, and hence mortal.
Orbus is in a state of terminal collapse because of global warming, and Billie joins an expedition to the new colony world of Planet Blue. She is accompanied by a Robo sapiens called Spike; and Billie and Spike fall in love. The Captain, Handsome, embarks upon a plan to rid Planet Blue of its dangerous land animals - dinosaurs - by crashing an asteroid into the planet. The plan goes wrong and the asteroid collision destablises the ecosystem to such a degree that all life is threatened. Spike and Billie survive together for some time, with Billie detaching Spike's limbs to prolong her existence; and finally Spike dies.
The second section is set in the past and tells the story of the Easter Islanders who rendered themselves extinct.
The third and fourth sections tell the story of a young woman called Billie Crusoe on Earth after a third world war. She is a robotics expert who is developing a robot called Spike. And on a whim, she takes Spike's head for a walk into the forbidden territories, where she finds rebels and mutants and discovers the secret of her world after intercepting a radio message from the distant past.
This secret unlocks the mystery of the novel. The action in the first section is not - as most readers would assume - a tale about humans in the far future. It is a tale about humanoids in the distant past whose meddling led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and hence made the evolution of mankind on Earth aka Planet Blue possible.
This is a nice twist, though hardly unexpected; and in this respect, the story is a beautifully told and elegant example of an 'uplift' narrative in which we learn that mankind evolved because of aliens.
But hold on a minute - how come the lead character in the first section has the same name as the lead character in the later sections? 'Billie' in the far distant past has a robot companion called Spike; 'Billie' in the near future has a robot companion called Spike also.
And to compound the confusion, Earth Billie is reading a novel called The Stone Gods which she describes as 'science fiction'. But if the Orbus story is true, no one on Earth can know about it. It all happened 65 million years ago!
This makes no sense; and I believe it quite deliberately makes no sense, in the way that abstract art and certain kinds of modernist poetry make no sense. It is non-sense, but not nonsense.
As I mentioned, Earth Billie is reading a book called The Stone Gods. And the Orbus Billie, in parallel fashion, is reading the journals of James Cook; again, an impossibility since Cook was born 65 million years after Orbus Billie. And Earth Billie - whose surname is Crusoe - meets a guide called Friday. What are the odds on that, then, eh?
This is not, I would strongly maintain, bad writing. It's skilful and very good writing of the avant-garde variety. At a very basic level, Winterson is confuting and mocking the underlying principle of science and hence science fiction - that ultimately, everything has a rational explanation. Seemingly impossible events may happen in SF, but they will always be explicable by the laws of physics - even if these are not the laws of physics as we know them. But Winterson's laws are the laws of poetry; she connects by simile and metaphor and mirroring and impossible coincidences. The most beautiful connection of all concerns Spike the robot. In the Orbus story, Spike is a whole robot who is dismantled a limb at a time until all that remains is her head. It's a deeply evocative sequence which for me echoes the experience of a person seeing a lover die slowly of old age - as limbs and organs fail and all that is left is the shining, shimmering personality of the lover in her husk-like dying carcass.
In the Earth story, Spike hasn't yet been built so Earth Billie carries her around as a head. Thus, Spike-Head in one story becomes Spike-Head in the later story; and that mirroring is somehow rather wonderful.
The Easter Island interlude is easy enough to interpret - it's not causally connection, it's just a variation on the theme (of human beings destroying their own habitat.) But the other sections are written in non-rational logic; and that is why I say they are not science fiction. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, and a clever book; but SF it ain't.
And this, I now believe, is why Winterson has said her novel isn't SF. It doesn't mean she hates SF (Earth Billie says she hates SF - but that's clearly a writer's gag!) It also doesn't mean that Winterson has failed to understand the essence of SF. In fact, the book shows a sophisticated grasp of world-building and scientific extrapolation which suggests to me Winterson has read a fair bit of science and SF and is fascinated by both. But her intentions, on this occasion, are Other.
That leads to the question; what genre is this book? It's not magic realism, in my view - because even magic realism has rules and consistencies. One impossible thing is allowed before breakfast - like the village where no one grows old, in Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude. But characters and events always feel real, and consistent; and actions always have consequences.
So this book is, in my view, a particular form of literary construct - a prose-poem, not a realist novel. It reminds me strongly of Italo Calvino's Invisble Cities, in which explorer Marco Polo gives accounts of the cities he has visited to Kublai Khan. Some argue (as I do in my radio play Marco Polo) that Marco Polo was a fantasist who never visited any of the cities he describes. And, playing with this idea, Calvino's book is an evocation of imaginary places, rather than a realistic travelogue. Here is Marco writing about the city of Leandra:
Gods of two species protect the city of Leandra. Both are too tiny to be seen and too numerous to be counted. One species stands at the doors of houses, inside, next to the coat rack and the umbrella stand; in moves, they follow the families and install themselves in the new home at the consignement of the keys. The others stay in the kitchen...they belong to the house, and when the family that has lived there goes away, they remain with the new tenants.
Or there's the spiderweb city of Octavia, in which the entire city is hung from hempen strands. Or another city where the citizens are constantly engaged in dialogue; the same dialogue will continue for centuries, because as each speaker dies a new citizen steps up to continue the dialogue.
At one point, Kublai Khan complains to Marco: 'Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed.' But there's no doubt that these imaginary cities exert a powerful hold over the reader; and this slim volume by Calvino has had a remarkable influence over many writers. I kept it by my side when I wrote Marco Polo; and now I come to look at it again, I realise how much I've been subconsciously influenced by Calvino in writing about the cities of Ketos.
And I have a strong hunch that Winterson knows this book, probably far far better than I do, and is consciously or unconsciously using it as the springboard for her imaginary worlds in The Stone Gods. Take this passage, where the crew swap stories about planets they have seen or heard about:
There's a planet they call Medusa. It's made of rock all right, but the rock has sharded and split so many times there's nothing solid - just strands of rock, splintered out from the surface like thick strands of hair...
There's a planet called Echo. It doesn't exist. It's like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty...
We found a planet, and it was white like a shroud. The planet was wrapped in its own death. We lowered ourselves through mists like mountains, cragged, formed, shaped, but not solid. Put your hand out and you put it through a ghost. Every solid thing had turned to thick vapour.
Later, we're told that the white planet is the original home of the Orbans; and that it shares a sun with the blue planet. This implies that the Orbans originally come from Venus, then travelled to a far planet somewhere else, before returning to Earth. Except...that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So it's easier by far, in my view, to regard all these tales as being Winterson's own Invisible Planets - far fetched fables of wonder and delight.
It's clear I would hope from the passages quoted above why I adore the playful imagination of Jeanette Winterson's book. And much of the prose (especially in this first section) is rich in verbal beauty, with cadences that stir the soul, and a command of style that reveal Winterson to be one of the finest writers of our age.
Overall, though, I have to say that the book disappoints. It overeggs its pudding - I love the story told by Captain Handsome which explains how history is destined to repeat itself. But to hammer that point home by showing history repeating itself on Earth, complete with two characters with the same name, seems to me to be talking down to the reader somewhat. It's a wonderful idea - we get it! - now move on, and tell us more about these magical two characters, Orbus Billie and Spike, and their fantastic 'lesbian' (is that the right word for sex between a woman and a female robot?) love affair. That's the bit where the book really takes fire; it's written with passion and pain and honesty, and then it stops, and clever satirical stuff takes over. Much of this clever satirical stuff is very good; but it never feels true in quite the same way.
Also, by switching narrative horses so radically, Winterson lumbers herself with a major practical problem; having created one vivid world, on Orbus, she now has to create a second and radically different post World War 3 world, on Earth. That's possible; but to do justice to her Post-3 War world she needs more time, more pages, more words. Instead, she pours the exposition on like gravy on turkey. And the subtle delicacy of her style is lost entirely.
It's still a very good book though, and I hope to give it a second read. As a final note, I should just say that the designer of the cover is an artist in her or his own right; it's beautiful and, if you look closely, it is also a superbly apt commentary on the novel's content.
I'm off to New York tomorrow, to do some Christmas shopping, catch a Broadway show, and meet my editor for lunch where we'll talk about my next novel.
Yikes! Did I just write that? Is it actually true?
I'm aware that for some writers, life is always like this. But for me, after years of grafting in TV and radio drama, this is a rare glimpse of what it's like to feel cool.
Of course, I've spoiled it now, by writing this blog and showing myself to be not cool at all. I'm just a rube with New York starshine in his eyes, and now the whole world (or that small proportion of the whole world which reads the blog) knows it.
Darn it....
There's a great piece by Karen Miller in the Book Swede's pages about how to write really hard, big novels...it resonates for me powerfully, after spending this year on a complex world-building SF novel (Ketos).
The bit of Karen's piece that fails for me though is her analogy with how you make a triple layer Black Forest gateau. Her theory is that it goes in the oven looking like a mess, and emerges looking magnificent. Trust me - not when I make cake! It always comes out far far worse than it goes in.
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 was once told it was possible to study Klingon as part of a language degree at a British university, though I can't remember which particular institution was offering that module...I suppose that may have been an urban myth, but I do hope it was and is true. There are so many ways of foolishly wasting time in this life - playing Spider Solitaire for instance! - that to devote several years to learning the language of the alien villains in Star Trek seems an eminently reasonable thing to do.
And recently, my wonderful copy editor at Orbit, Bella, has devoted some of her valuable time to creating a language for one of the species of aliens in Debatable Space, the flame beasts. In my MSS, I just used gibberish to indicate their dialogue - which is created by a series of flashing lights generated by their own bodies. (Since they are made of flame...)
Bella, with magnificent devotion to duty, has rendered the flame beasts' dialogue intelligible by creating an entire alphabet out of non-standard icons. And if you know the code and become fluent in flame beast lingo, you can read these sections and they will make sense.
The 'flame beast language' is of course a human transliteration of the actual flashes of light. But it occurs to me that it might be possible to have a laptop programmed to render the flame beasts words into two languages at once - into flashes of light, and into symbols that can be read. The symbols could also be given a phonetic value; and before you know where you are, we could be speaking flame beast!
Astronomers could then study pulsars and variable stars to see whether the patterns generated corresponded in any way to flame beast words. Because, of course, it's quite possible that the very stars speak flame beast...
Thanks, Bella, for your heroic efforts; I fear however that I am not up to the task of writing an entire novel in the flame beast language....Klingon, yes, now that's an easy task by comparison.
I've just finished reading the excellent and immensely ingenious Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It's a book which plays a very clever game - drawing on the ancient myths of Anansi the Spider God, and mixing it in with an entertaining contemporary drama/comedy. It's a warm, lovely, feel-good kind of a book, as one would expect from the warm-hearted, kind-spirited Gaiman.
But fortunately, it's not too nice. In fact for my money, the book really gets into its stride when a ghastly and horrific murder is committed. Yay! Bring it on! my inner demon yelled at that moment. Now we're cooking with vitriol and bile...!
In an interview published as an afterword to the book, Gaiman admitted that this twist in the story came as a surprise to him (ah! so I'm not the only writer who doesn't plan his bloody stories in advance...) and it forced him to totally rethink the rest of the book because, 'I didn't want anything quite that dark to happen to any of the characters.' But I'm glad he took the left hand fork in the road, the one that leads the dark side; because a novel that's all nice is an oyster shell with neither grit nor nacre.
Gaiman is, of course, an absolute softie - all his main characters, even the wicked Spider in Anansi Boys tend to have a heart of gold. But Gaiman's malicious streak is a joy to behold. Take this little section from Neverwhere, in which the evil hitmen Mister Vandemar and Mr Croup are pursuing a young girl, with intent to murder:
'Bless me, Mister Vandemar, she's slowing up.'
'Slowing up, Mister Croup.'
'She must be losing a lot of blood, Mister V.'
'Lovely blood, Mister C. Lovely wet blood.'
'Not long now.'
A click; the sound of a flick knife opening, empty and lonely and dark.
That last phrase is poetry from the quill of Lucifer - bleak and menacing and ghastly. And in a later scene, the evil Misters commit gory and gruesome torture and murder, sending streaks of darkness through Gaiman's light, witty prose, and creating rich chiaroscuro.
While reading Anansi Boys, I was niggled by a sense that there was something familiar about the story. It's a classic tale of course - an ordinary Joe turns out to be the son of a God, with god-like powers himself. And it reminded me strongly of The Eternals, the graphic novel re-make of Jack Kirby's original, which Gaiman himself wrote (all the best writers steal from themselves!) But, as I mused about the need to have nastiness mixed in with niceness, I then remembered another graphic novel with a similar premise - the brilliant (and truly truly nasty) Wanted by Mark Millar. In this story Wesley Gibson, an ordinary Joe, discovers that he is in fact the son of - not a god, but a supervillain, called The Killer. And he has also inherited his father's super-powers - which basically consist of the ability to kill, very very well. Wesley is cajoled into taking up his father's mantle (cape?) and becomes a super-villain, with bloody consequences.
It's gripping stuff, a perfect setup for a classic character journey/twist, in which Wesley realises in the nick of time that supervillainy is not for him - he is going to be a superhero after all! Thus, achieving redemption, etc etc, and setting a moral example for us all. This, as I say, is what I was expecting....
I won't spoil the story by going into more detail; but suffice to say, this story shocks because it starts nasty and it stays nasty. I remember reading it in a state of stunned incredulity - surely someone will turn out to have some redeeming qualities?
Nope, they don't. It's dark, bleak and nihilistic from start to stop. But it's not, I would argue, immoral or amoral - hell, it's a story, not a rampaging mob in your local pub! And it's a story which plays with ideas about good and evil in a complex way. It is written with wit and brilliant satirical edge, and it openly mocks our assumptions about how a comic book story ought to work. (It has a supervillain called Fuckwit, and an even eviller supervillain called Shit-Head, who is made of 'one hundred per cent excrement...the collected feces of the six hundred and sixty-six most evil human beings that ever walked the earth.') If Jonathan Swift had written graphic novels, he'd be jealous of that line....
It intrigues me to see how two writers can take essentially the same story premise (ordinary Joe, father a god/superpowered being, son turns out to have the father's powers) and yet can create two such radically different stories. Both Millar and Gaiman write with wit and verbal flair, and both of them have a morally sophisticated approach to their material. But Millar shocks us with his nastiness, while Gaiman charms us with his niceness.
I don't know either writer - but I'm sure that in real life, Millar is as nice as they come. But he writes like a Tequila Slammer, in sharp intoxicating bursts; while Gaiman is a glass of Pimms on a hot summer's afternoon.
Interestingly, many friends who know me as a person, and as a teacher, are genuinely shocked when they read my screenplays and prose - because my writing is way nastier than I am. In the Nice V. Nasty spectrum, I'm closer to Millar than Gaiman.
Although, some would argue, and have argued, especially after seeing that sinister photograph at the top of this blog, that the 'Nice Palmer' is just a facade...I'm evil through and through. I'm the Cheo, not Flanagan...
Hmmm..trouble is I do like that idea. Who wants to be Superman - when you can be the Killer!
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...