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!

Red Claw Stuff

I've just been told of an exciting book tournament being held by BSCreview...It's a knockout competition between rival books and the last book standing will, presumably, win fair maiden.

Hey - great idea!

Details are here.   And my novel Red Claw is one of 64 genre books selected to compete for the best genre novel of the year crown.  I'm up against Dragon Keeper by fantasy novelist Robin Hobb and - hold on one minute? Is this fair!  A tournament between a fantasy writer and an SF guy! Why not a space battle with plasma guns?

Leaving that aside; you can take part by voting (for Red Claw! Obviously! Pay attention out there...) on this thread.

Meanwhile, the cover (and indeed content) of Red Claw have been getting lovely mentions over at SF Signal in their feature on Recent sf/f/h Book Covers That Blow Us Away; look out for the contributions from Aidan Moher and SFF artist Bob Eggleton.

Are Shit Reviews Good for a Writer’s Soul?

In the last few weeks I've been dabbling in controversial topics on this blogsite. First I DARED TO DEFY the great John Scalzi by pointing out that he's totally (utterly! completely!) wrong to argue that Inglourious Basterds is not a science fiction movie.  (It's multi-genre, but one of its genres is definitely alternate history, a subgenre of SF.)  Then I launched an attack on one of the greatest SF directors of all time by asking, Is James Cameron a Traitor to His Own Species? (Answer: Yes!)

This week however I'm going to delve into the murkiest, darkest topic of all: the topic of how writers should deal with crap reviews of their work.

The truth is that all writers, however established, however talented,  get crap reviews from time to time. However, it's also the case that really CRAP writers get crap reviews, and deservedly so.  Thus,  every writer is disheartened, demoralised, and let's face it, humiliated when the stinky reviews come along.  Writing is a lot to do with maintaining self confidence and self esteem; and the crap review can often be the pin that bursts the balloon.

The great John Scalzi (I love this man - how the HELL does he write so many blogs, AND write novels, and consult for TV, and have a family, and still have a sense of humour?) has confronted this delicate issue head on by actually publishing crap reviews of his own books on his own website.  All the two star and one star reviews he gets on Amazon - he doesn't pretend they don't exist, he just prints them.  And a couple of other writers have followed suit. It's a great way to diminish the writer's agony;  a bit like easing the pain from a stubbed toe by breaking your own little finger.   

I haven't got that much courage, but I am going to give a link to a recent review of my novel Red Claw which is really REALLY bad.  In fact, I've never had such a bad review (well, apart from the Amazon review that said Debatable Space was 'the worst book ever written' or similar.)  It's a STINKER. And here it is.  (Be warned, there's a major - in fact THE major - plot spoiler dropped into the critique at about the mid-point.)

I've  read the entire review; it's intelligent, well argued, well written, and is a devastating demolition job of a novel I don't recognise.  But I can't deny that The Blogger Who Hates My Book is smart and sincere and entirely entitled to his opinion.

Other critics have been kinder, and the major press crits have been highly favourable (though the guy from SFX clearly thinks I'm really weird.)  But the views of bloggers are hugely important in this genre - bloggers tell it like it is, and I value that.  So to restore my battered pride I'm also going to link two reviews by bloggers who DID read the book I thought I wrote. So there's this one,  and this one.  

These things are subjective - blah blah. We all know that.  But I'm beginning to think there's something interesting about the way my work seems to polarise readers in the SFF community.  My publishers, Orbit Books. are also fascinated by this - they actually think it's a good thing! (Rather to my surprise.)  And they even published a flyer for Red Claw containing a blend of my good and crap Amazon reviews for Debatable Space. This came as something as a shock for me - as a point of policy, I stopped googling myself and reading my Amazon crits about a month after DS was published - so I hadn't even seen some of these negative crits.  I'd thought that everyone loved the damned book!

Gulp.

Anyway, the point is there are things about my work that some people love, and others hate.  In Debatable Space, it was Lena's story that divided people - for some it made the book special, more than just a space opera shoot 'em up.  For others, it was a foolish digression.  Stick to the point, you idiot! seemed to be the gist. 

The one critical comment that haunts me - from a blogger called Liviu - is the suggestion that Red Claw is in some way less maverick, less bold, less iconoclastic  than Debatable Space. I hope that's not true; but it might be.  But I guess I would counter-argue that with DS I never intended to 'break the rules' just for the hell of it.  All I wanted to do is write an SF novel that shocked and enthralled the reader.  And I think the only 'rule' I broke is a dumb and stupid rule, and it's this:

Everything should be about the plot.

This is a guiding principle of much mediocre television drama; the note producers and directors give to writers all the time, because they think they're being 'focused'.  (But watch a great TV drama by McGovern or Abbott or Russell T. and it's the minor characters, the digressions, the turns of phrase, all the things that create the texture of the world that make the stories come to life!)  And in my years working as a television writer,  it used to drive me mad.  Because plot is just what happens in the story; the story is why it happens. 

So in DS, the plot involves a war between Flanagan, Lena and the Cheo; but the story is WHY these people get involved in this war, and why we should care. So the 'digressions' about Flanagan's life, and the long sections with Lena, are about the Why. That's why these bits matter; they don't advance the plot, they advance the STORY. And, more than anything, the story of the book is the story of Lena - a thousand years of fucking up, getting it wrong, being too passive, being too arrogant, falling in love with the wrong guy, finally finding the right guy - that's the story that interests me.  The fact she gets embroiled in a galactic war is almost a side-issue set against all that.

That's how it seems to me anyway.  But I think everyone who hates the book hates it because they LIKE plot.  They like plot more than anything else.  And that's fine; but it's just not the way I write books. (In Red Claw, the Story begins with Hugo Baal writing about the biosphere of the planet - the thriller stuff is the plot but the STORY is that - scientific passion for the myriad forms of life on a world run by evil bastards who don't care about alien bugs and their morphology.)

Here's another thing some people seem to hate: Irony.  I use a lot of irony.  But some folks don't care for it, and maybe don't even see when it's there.  And that's fair enough.  There are plenty of books I love which have no irony. But it's clearly  something that's deep in my soul, a warped love of not saying what I mean but letting it emerge through the cracks. 

Here's an example of my kind of irony, from Red Claw. It's a diary passage written by Hugo Baal after the death of Jim Aura - a minor (very minor) character who Hugo, as a self-obsessed geek type, has never really noticed or cared about, until Jim's horrific demise.

From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal.

June 44^th

The death of Jim Aura has affected all of us badly. 

I didn’t know him well, I have to admit. I’ve never really connected with the Noirs.  And there was something about Jim’s staring black eyes that repelled me. Though he was a fine Scientist, albeit of a practical bent.  And, apparently, so I’m told, he had a wonderful singing voice.  A lyric tenor, of professional calibre. Though he never sang for us.  In fact,  to be honest, we hardly ever spoke to him.  Or at least, I hardly ever did.  He was such a reserved and distant individual.  He never got animated, even when the Fungists were in full rant.  He always wore black, and apparently he always knew he was a Noir, though he didn’t have his eyes and the tattoos done until we reached Xabar.  In fact, I think it was only a few months before the Hooperman attack that he made the final surgical commitments.  Though I might be wrong about that, I didn’t really notice him to be honest.

And, as I say, he never talked about himself much. Or, indeed,  at all.  He kept himself to himself, even after our shared trauma at the Depot. Though perhaps by that point, he was in mourning,  for the rest of the Noirs? I suppose he was, in a sense,  the last of his kind?

Even so, we all thought he was rather spooky. Or at least, I did.  Although, looking back, I wonder if -

Well,  I suppose. Maybe - 

But no. No maybe about it!  We definitely should have made more effort to talk to him.  After all, we’re all in this together aren’t we?

Except he’s not. Not any more.

But those black eyes! So alienating.  And yet -

Anyway.  His death has shocked us.  It was an unnecessary death. A foolish death.

The impact of Jim’s body hitting the earth created a vast hole in the ground, deeper than any we have dug.  We attempted to retrieve the body but a landslide took it away from us.  We have analysed soil samples and discovered that at a depth of forty metres and more the soil here is infested with and almost possessed by a complex interlocking micro-organism.  The soil in this region is, it seems, alive.

But I have no zest for analysing this in any more detail. Jim was a bright and brilliant  spirit, so I’m now told, and had a dark wit and a wonderful sense of humour, though I never experienced it myself, as well as black eyes.  I feel his death as though it were my own, well okay, not quite, but I am certainly very moved by it. 

Things are not good.

How does that advance the plot? It doesn't!  But have you ever had that shocking experience - of realising that someone 'ordinary' who you've barely noticed is actually complex and intriguing, and has just as much of a rich inner life as you do? And you've missed the moment to find out more, to get to know this person properly?   If so, you might like the way I write here. If not, well, not.

But my honest feeling is - and I know I shouldn't say this!  -  if you're someone who  likes everything to be about the plot,   and who  doesn't like irony, then please,  steer clear. Don't read my books.

(But do BUY my books; buy half a dozen copies of each in fact; and give them as Christmas presents to your enemies.  It will, trust me, be a hugely satisfying and deeply ironical revenge...)

That just leaves the question that started this blog: Are Shit Reviews Good for a Writer's Soul?

Curiously, I think they are.  I had three comments about Red Claw  over the weekend. On Saturday morning,  I spoke on the phone to my former Bill script editor - the smartest, most creatively impressive woman I know  - and though she' s no SF fan, she told me how much she adored Red Claw and the way it's written. Then later the same day, a female friend who is a social worker and who also doesn't read much SF told me she'd just read Debatable Space and loved it - mainly because of the portrait it gives of the flawed, fallible 1000 year old Lena.

And that's nice. Writers like to be praised. If fact, we like it too  much; we spend our days writing just IN ORDER to be praised.  And although praise is nice, it doesn't do much to help the quality of the work.

But that same day I read the piece by the Blogger Who Hates My Book - and it filled me with a huge creative energy.  It helped define me as a writer; it energised me in the writing of my new novel.

Without occasional shit reviews, in other words,  writers can get flabby, lazy, and timid. 

So I truly believe that a certain amount of virtriol - ah! I can taste it in my nostrils now! - can be good for a writer's soul.

On Red Claw

Here are some images which inspired Red Claw.

Red Claw is the story of science and nature on an alien planet, featuring a motley crew of obsessional scientists who are patiently and carefully cataloguing all the species. Then the Doppelanger Robots start killing them...

The first set of images are taken from Wildlife Pictures Online - for Quality Pictures from Africa, which I highly recommend. 

Sunset over Kruger Park

Nature red in tooth and claw...

What SF author could have invented a creature as strange as this?

 

Or this?

 

 

A horse, with stripes?

I'm sorry, but this is just so cute...

Here's Arnie...

Meet the good guys.

And the bad guy.

 

And here's Arnie one more time...!

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.

Best of 2009?

Over at SF Crowsnest, they've compiled their list of the top 100 SFF novels of 2009....I'm glad to see Red Claw is in there, at number 17....

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.

On Space Art

I just had a very nice email from a 'space artist' called Brian Smallwood, who has just read and loved Red Claw.

Check out these amazing images on his website, here.

Forbidden Planet

I had a delightful morning in Forbidden Planet earlier this week, signing copies of Red Claw.  (They've sold quite a few, but there are still plenty left!)

This shop really is nerd heaven, isn't it? And the manager assured me that he and all his staff are indentured to the shop - all their wages are spent buying books and graphic novels, and they rely on the kindness of strangers for food and suchlike.

No Waste of Time

I've been meaning to write a blog about the A Space of Waste? debate I attended at Greenwich Observatory, as part of the Sci-Fi London event.  It was a terrific night - we held the panel debate in the library of the new Observatory, a beautiful galleried room just under the dome.  There were brass telescopes and helioscopes (is there such a thing? did I just make it up) in glass cupboards, surrounded by walls of books; and all in all, it was bibliophile and steam punk heaven.

Paul McAuley gave a wonderful and learned talk about the solar system, illustrated with the most amazing slides.  He also proved we're better off living on Saturn's moon Enceladus, rather than on Earth. (I forget the details of the argument, but I was utterly convinced at the time).

Jaine Fenn, a very charming speculative fiction writer who like me is represented by the wonderful John Jarrold, spoke with real passion about space and its magnitude and why we should explore it. And I was particuarly pleased to meet legendary web guy and critic Paul  Raven, who, since the topic was based on the premise that SF writers shouldn't in fact write about space,  gallantly kept the debate alive by arguing in favour of Mundane SF - which likes to avoid improbable intergalactic travel and unlikely sentient aliens.  But, hand on heart, Paul  clearly loves his space opera as much as the next SF geek.   

My argument was that hard SF is based around a deception.  All the credible science and all the accurate scientific theory is a smokescreen to disguise the fact that other inhabited planets are, in all probability, a very long way away.  And though wormholes in space may exist - the chances of an actual spaceship travelling through such things, seem  to be honest, slim.  In which case, it could (for all we know) take millions of years to reach the nearest habitable planet, travelling at less than the speed of light.

But you can't tell a spectacular SF story with ships that slow!  So every space opera writer has to hold his or her nose and embrace a piece of nonsense - quantum teleportation, FTL drives, and/or a ridiculous plethora of very near habitable planets which can be fully terraformed in an implausibly small amount of time.

In other words, SF is fiction about the possible - not about the likely. And that's the fun of it. Or to put it another way: SF writers are conjurers, who misdirect and deceive with scientific facts, in order to make you believe in the reality of what you are reading, however insanely improbable it might be.

Sci-Fi London did a great job organising this event - which is called Oktoberfest because a) it's in October and b)  the name makes people think about beer, and thinking about beer makes people feel happy.  Robert Grant did a splendid job of making it all happen, and even wrote me a nice mention on the Sci-Fi London website.

What’s in a name?

I've been following a very interesting debate on the Guardian books blog ...Damian G. Walter writes well and wittily about the state of SF, and how the ideas and (dare I use this pretentious word? Yes I'm using it!) tropes of science fiction have entered the mainstream.

However, he also uses the phrase 'post sci-fi', which frankly I don't understand.  (As a concept, it seems to me to be, forgive my bluntness, post-sensible.) And as the thread develops, there creeps in the idea that there is a fundamental difference between 'sci-fi' (which I pronounce to rhyme with 'hi-fi' - that's the gag isn't it? why spoil a good joke by calling it 'skiffy'?) and SF.  Sci-fi, Damian explicitly says, is the term we should use for Xena: Warrior Princess as opposed to Gene Wolfe (which is 'proper' SF).  In other words, dumb SF on TV and B-movies are  'sci-fi', as are 'bad' novels which inhabit an SF universe -  the corny squids-in-space stuff. By contrast,  SF is the term that serious people use to reference a serious genre of ideas.

Er - ahem?  What's wrong with Squids in Space? What's wrong with Xena? (Though I would have called that fantasy not SF  myself, but let's not quibble.) What's wrong with Barsoom? Dan Dare? Dumb action science fiction?  Is The Matrix sci-fi or SF? Who gets to judge?

My answers to those questions would be: Nothing.  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.  Both - the words mean the same thing. No-one gets to judge - you can't define a genre by how much 'quality' it has. That way madness lies.

Science fiction is a great term to describe  a genre based on extrapolation, imagination, and amazing stuff that isn't based on magic.  Sometimes science fiction is profound and rich and complex (1984, Brave New World, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Peter Hamilton at his best, Ian McDonald's Brazyl,  Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward, Silverberg, Sturgeon - you can write your own list), sometimes it's sensational action-packed pulp (A.E.Van Vogt, most of Heinlein, E.E. Doc Smith, much modern military SF and, ahem, everything I've written in the genre to date.) 

But sometimes, of course, sensational  'pulp' can be of the highest quality - just as in the crime genre, where Chandler and Hammett wrote, literally, for the the pulp mags - and sometimes reading 'serious' SF is as boring as watching paint dry. But I can't see any merit at all in drawing a line in the sand dividing 'dumb' science fiction from 'clever' science fiction. 

There is, I'm aware, a distinguished tradition (see here, under Definitions) in the world of SF of using 'sci-fi' in this, essentially, belittling sense.  Even so, it annoys the hell out of me.   For it seems me a losing tack for science fiction fans (always so stern in berating literary writers who use SF 'tropes' and yet deny they are writing SF) to then deny that any science fiction they don't like - the common, pulpy, B-movie stuff - isn't science fiction at all. 

I'd argue that we in the SF community should allow words mean what they are generally understood to mean.  Otherwise, sympathetic  occasional readers who aren't experts in the genre are going to think we're a bunch of, well, obsessive nerds (if they don't already think so...)

I am, of course, rather touchy on this front, because I'm a great adherent of sensationalist pulp type science fiction in my own work.  My aim in the books I've written so far is to write pulp with a dash of difference.  Not 'crap', but 'pulp'.  (I was delighted when one blogger called Red Claw a 'mashup of 1950s B Monster movie, space opera, and Douglas Adams.')  And mixed in with the lurid pulp, there's some character stuff too, and maybe even some ideas that give you pause for thought. So am I writing SF, or am I 'merely' writing 'sci-fi'?

Damn it all: I write science fiction, abbreviate that how you like.   But anyone who tries to relegate the 'pulp' element of science fiction to the servants' quarters does not get my vote. I do love certain examples of cerebral science fiction; but I firmly believe that lurid sensationalism, exhilarating adventure, and stupid stuff in SF is never to be sniffed at - it's in the DNA of the genre.  And the vast spectrum of SF/sci-fi/science fiction content - from profound to silly, via every other point of the compass - is part of its appeal.

Red Claw Day

It's one day to the official publication date of Red Claw in the UK...it's a nice, but strange feeling when a book is almost but not quite out.

I wrote a few words about what inspired me to write this book for Sci Fi Now.

And signed copies can be purchased from my local bookstore, The Bookseller Crow on the Hill.

Enjoy!

Free copies of Red Claw

Get your free copy of Red Claw (if you're lucky) from this man.

On the Wonder of Nature

Last night I watched the first episode in a 3 part series about  naturalists.  Yeah, I know that sounds as exciting as watching paint dry. But in fact, it was an extraordinary hour of television  - a story of heroism, wonder, beauty and amazing, adorable people.

The series is called Land of the Lost Volcano; you can watch episode 1 on iPlayer here, and watch the next episodes on BBC1 at 9pm for the next two Tuesdays.   It's a filmed account of an expedition to Papua New Guinea which has been heavily covered in the press, actually getting to the front page of several broadsheets - because these scientists have actually discovered a 'Lost World', never before visited by humans, in which there are literally scores of new species, including fanged frogs, woolly rats, hairy caterpillars (VERY hairy) and  huge stick insects. It's not exactly on a par with Conan Doyle's Lost World - where the dinosaurs still roamed.  But it's a still an astonishing discovery in this internet age.

And, as well as fascinating and beguiling me, this programme shattered forever my long held conviction that male scientists are all nerdy boffins in specs.  (If I were a scientist - that's the kind of scientist I would be!)  But all of the guys on this New Guinea expedition are fit and charismatic and competent, and a couple are out and out hunks, with bulging biceps and triceps and rippling six-packs.  (For the female viewer, this show is better than Smallville, in terms of guys getting their shirts off).  The female scientists also looked highly dashing and attractive, I should note, and, indeed, did note.  And the camaraderie and excitement amongst the members of this expedition was utterly exhilarating to witness, and share in.

One guy - wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan - spent hours trapped in a hot hide with flies and bees dancing on his face, bored to tears but forced to keep concentrating, for a brief glimpse of a pygmy parrot.  (Two of them eventually appeared, tiny and colourful and very much in love.)  And in this episode, we saw Steve - a climber as well as a naturalist, as he left the main expedition to join a group of climbers on a nearby island.  Their job was to search inside a vast cave network under the lush tree-covered mountains for new species. And to do that - they had a climb a sheer rock face in order to clamber into a cave next to a vast waterfall. And once inside, they clambered through narrow tunnels,  soaked by the torrents running through, until Steve eventually free-climbed up ANOTHER sheer rock face next to a torrent of water in order to secure the ropes that would allow the rest of the climbers to (rather more safely) join him.

This was a cave! It was dark! Wet!  Steve had no rope - there was a rope, left by a previous expedition, but he disdained this as 'not safe'.  The water was pounding down on his body as he climbed. The rock kept breaking away in his fingers. But he did it anyway, with delightful gusto and a complete absence of fear.  This is not science as I used to know it - observing whether the precipitation was observed, pounding dots on the body of an ameoba with a pencil, or dissecting a dead rat. Instead, this was the sort of science that Indiana Jones would call science; science for heroes.

In another scene, a deadly snake was picked up by a scientist who peered at its markings to decide which particular species of deadly snake it might be.  For pete's sake - it's a deadly snake! Throw it away!  Hit it with a brick! But no, with a whoop of joy, the scientist allowed the scary but beautiful creature to run loose into the wild again. Because this is not a hunting expedition, or a capturing-animals expedition - it's a study of nature.  Each creature that is caught by the team (for they do use trap cages) is lovingly measured and recorded, then returned safely to its home, sometimes after being given a stroke, or a hug, or even a kiss. (The head of the expedition, Dr George McGavin, actually kissed a beetle.)

The infectious enthusiasm of these glorious pioneers is a joy.  And their zeal has an agenda - the loggers are already cutting down large swathes of rainforest on this island, and one of the aims of the expedition is to prove that this is a rich habitat full of creatures new to science which absolutely HAS to be conserved, and treasured.

Episode 1 mainly shows the team in the foothills of the extinct volcano Mount Bosavi; in later episodes they descend into the volcano itself - now a vast concave jungle.  And it's the volcano that is the real 'Lost World' - it's not accessible to climbers, and no natives have ever travelled to this legendary place.  The only way to get there is by helicopter, which is what our guys and gals will do next ep. 

I have a particular fascination in this programma, and this subject, because one of the major themes of my new novel Red Claw is the joy of discovering new species.  It's an action thriller, I should stress - there's a bad guy - there are frequent shoot-em-up action sequences - lots of people and robots die violent deaths - but at heart it's a love song to Nature.  A group of xeno-biologists on an alien planet (which I call New Amazon) are tasked with recording and cataloguing all the alien species - from the vast monstrous dinosaur-like Godzillas to the tiny insects known as Six-Heads (which build huge walls out of their own excrement.)  All the scientists are obsessive, and filled with a passion and zeal for their work that consumes their every waking hour.  They may be the stooges of an evil empire (okay, okay, I mustn't give away too much story here) but first and last they are scientists.

Much of my research for the book consisted of reading books written by naturalists and explorers who in the 19th century ventured into Africa and South America where they discovered - on a daily basis - new species of animals.  I've always felt that the exhilaration of that moment must be unsurpasssable - to be the first person ever to see this species of animal!  And I wanted to replicate that joy in a science fictional setting - for every time humans land on an alien planet, there will be so much wildlife, all of it unknown to man.

But the members of the expedition in Papua New Guinea are having this same experience, right now, on a planet which is still rich in undiscovered and unknown new creatures.

I'm tempted to join them. And if only I weren't afraid of snakes, unable to fly a helicopter, incompetent at climbing sheer rock cliffs, susceptible to nasty rashes in bad weather, allergic to mosquitos and fly-bites,  appallingly bad at getting up in the morning, and sadly deficient in six-pack, then trust me - I would be there now!

Red Claw: Pub dates

I once had an email from my agent with the header 'Pub dates' and I thought I was being invited on a pub crawl...in fact, this is publisher code for 'publication date'. 

Now, a wiser man, I've been given the pub dates for Red Claw - it comes out in Blighty on the 1st October (soon!) and slightly later in the US, on the 15th October.  Copies of the book are now with the Orbit guys, and I'm expecting a Red Cross parcel of books any day now.