Science Fiction
Richard Morgan is the worthy winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2008, for his blistering and complex thriller Black Man. I found it gripping and evocative, with a dangerously bad hero who at the start of the story makes a living hunting down mutants known as variant 13s...even though he himself is a variant 13.
But what happened to variants 1 through 12 I wonder? Is there a sequel about them?
Richard gave a very honest and sweet and funny acceptance speech, and walks away with a cheque for £2008, and much kudos.
The award ceremonies were held as part of the Sci Fi London season, and we were greeted by a host of Star Wars characters including a scary Darth Vader and a scantily attired Princess Leia. I got a chance to meet all the people I only just left behind at the Alt Fiction Festival (oh Lord, it's not Palmer again), and I also had time for a longer chat with the very likeable fantasy writer Stephen Hunt. As many of you know, he's a real multi-tasker - he writes epic fantasy novels, founded and still presides over the sf crowsnest website and has a demanding day job in the private equity sector.
I also had a chance to tell Ken Macleod how much I admire and love his Execution Channel. For me, it's a 'stayer', one of those books that stays with you long after you've read it, as you think back on the ideas and the themes.
After several hours of mingling and sipping (ha! sipping! who am I trying to fool?!) wine, I then rashly went on to watch one of the films in the Sci Fi Festival, Marc Caro's intriguing and allegorical Dante 01. I found it beautifully shot, with amazing French actors, and full of great moments. But I have to confess that, after watching Battlestar Galactica with all its fabulous action scenes and varied alien planets, I do now find it hard to watch an SF yarn set on a spaceship which hardly ever gets out of the standing set.
Still, there' s a great finale, and Caro has a magical way with the camera.
Before the big film, we had a sneak preview of the new Batman movie, with a trailer which has been scratched and defaced and mucked about with by the Joker. This was just so cool....
I've just returned from Alt Fiction in Derby, and I can't beat Brian Ruckley's hilarious and lyrical account of the goings-on there, and on the way there, and on the way back.
Brian and I both read excerpts from our respective works in a Mass Book Launch, with Stephen Hunt and Simon Spurrier. This was a smorgasbord of fiction fare, ranging from heroic epic fantasy (Brian and Stephen) to neo-noir (Simon's novel about a hitman whose victims keep coming back to life) to whatever Debatable Space might be.
I also did a panel on screenwriting with Graham Joyce and Michael Marshall Smith which was wild and excitable and I hope informative.
Darren Turpin and Sam Smith, Orbit honchos both, were in attendance, and I was delighted to share a dinner table with Mike Carey, who is currently writing the X Men and working for Sci Fi Channel, and is hence officially the Jammiest Beggar around.
Alt Fiction is currently funded by Derby City Council and we're all hoping they continue to give their support to the event in future years - it's clearly a huge success and deserves to thrive.
I've come away with a pile of books by authors who I met and admire, and will be reading Brian's Winterbirth, Graham Joyce's Smoking Poppy, Simon Spurrier's Contract and Tony Ballantyne's Recursion as soon as possible.
Apart from the sheer joy of socialising with so many smart and entertaining people, this was a forum for ideas to be thrown around, and insights to be gleaned. I came back with my head exploding with ideas for new stories, and a yearning to write some fantasy and horror as well pursuing my core passion, hard but quirky sf....
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...
On the 30th April the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best SF novel published last year will be announced, at a ceremony held in tandem with the London Science Fiction Festival.
This year's shortlist has attracted some controversy, since, as well as works by established masters like Ken McLeod and Richard Morgan, it includes a number of book which aren't obviously SF at all. Some in the biz have argued that the judges have passed over some excellent candidates for the shortlist in favour of more 'literary' fare. (My own agent, John Jarrold, has argued this pithily, and with his usual authority - he's read every book on the shortlist, plus every single SF novel that he feels should have been on the shortlist.
I'm not so well read, so I'm attempting to educate myself by reading some of the novels on the shortlist that might otherwise have passed me by. I have Sarah Hall's The Carullan Army on my shelf; and I've just finished reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which I thought was delightful and funny and often very moving.
But is it SF? Hall himself argues, very sweetly, that he's happy for it to be called SF, because it's not for him to tell the reader how to read it. That's a devastatingly good and wise argument.
Being a genre nerd, however, I love to have things more firmly pigeonholed than that. Dammit, Steven, stop being so fair-minded!
And for my money, though I loved it, I don't think of Hall's book as an SF novel. Because I didn't, ultimately, believe a word of it, and I don't think I was meant to.
And what I mean by saying this is that for me SF is a genre that demands total suspension of disbelief. However silly the story elements may be (dilithium crystals, Barsoom, Stargazer aliens, variant 13s, um, flame beasts, etc) we, the SF readers, like to believe it might all be true. We will forgive occasional science cheats, and plot cheats, and even moments of utter absurdity; we'll forgive almost anything really, if we're enjoying the read. But when I journey into outer space, or inner space, I want to believe I'm really going there...
Hall's novel, however, is much more postmodern than that. It's a book which requires to believe its story; and also to disbelieve it. It's overtly metatextual, as some literary theorists might say. And it's very much in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges - the writer of wonderful metaphysical conceits - and Paul Auster, the postmodern crime novelists who is referenced several times, rather than the tradition of Heinlein and Asimov and Reynolds and Grimwood and Macleod and Hamilton and Macdonald, who all wrote about or write about worlds they believe in.
To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the plot of Hall's book so
BEWARE!!! PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!
The Raw Shark Texts is about a man called Eric Sanderson who wakes up and doesn't know who he is. A psychologist explains he is suffering from amnesia, induced by pscyhic trauma after the tragic death of his girlfriend Clio. But then Eric gets a note from his former self (the First Eric Sanderson) explaining that he, Eric Two, is being stalked by an actual monster called a Ludovician Shark, which is a creature that exists in the n-dimensional realm of ideas.
There's some science to justify this - on the basis that life is a hardy little bugger and can evolve in the strangest of places. So why can't it evolve in the realm of ideas???? As Eric 1 explains to his later self:
The animal hunting you is a Ludovican. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect....The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on human memories and the instrinsic sense of self.
This is superb; but for me, it's also knowing, defiantly metaphorical, and not intended to be believed literally. And I like that aspect of the storytelling. The hero travels through a tunnel made of books - well which of us hasn't, metaphorically? And he is almost killed by a conceptual fish - as his personality is unpicked because of his deep grief at the tragic death of the woman he loved. And again, the postmodern strings are showing, as the novel reveals itself to be 'really' about something other than what it seems to be about.
But, by contrast, a similiar but totally science fictional piece would be Eric Brown's masterful short story The Time-Lapsed Man. I won't plot-spoil this one, but I would just say that, though the premise is utterly absurd, just as absurd as the notion of the Ludovician shark, the writer made me believe it was true for the duration of my reading. And of course, because I believe the story is true, I care.
Having said all this, I have to quickly add that if anyone wants to argue that Hall's book genuinely is science fiction, I'd be happy to give that view credence, and shelf-room, and indeed to argue the point over a pint or two, since that's always a good way of enlivening a pint or two. It's not for me to be the Ferryman on the River Charon, deciding who and who shouldn't get across.
But my only anxiety is that any lover of SF who reads this book expecting to have a science fictional experience might be disappointed. It doesn't, in my view, deliver as SF; but it does deliver as what it is, a tour de force piece of lunatic idea-spinning which is full of gags and has some of the most tender love scenes I've read in a long time.
I guess the judges' aim is to challenge our preconceptions about what is and isn't modern SF. I argued in another blog that Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods isn't, in fact, an SF novel, though some claim it is. (On this score, I'm as one with Winterson, who witheringly refuses the SF label.)
But my point really is to passionately stress and affirm the common purpose of pretty much all the SF that I've ever enjoyed - namely, an underlying respect for rationality and of the ideas and sense of wonder which underly the scientific enterprise.
I may be wrong, however, in my opinions on this book. I may in fact be destined to become the next victim of a conceptual shark that swallows up all my ideas and memories and leaves me gibbering, and indeed, in much the state I was in on the morning after the last Eastercon.
But I would strongly recommend The Raw Shark Texts to anyone who wants a rollercoaster ride through the realm of ideas. (And I hope my plot spoilers don't give away too much - it's no more than is explained on the back cover.)
Bella Pagan has written a lovely piece about her experience at Eastercon...which include getting lost in those scarily winding corridors at the Renaissance Hotel. I had a wonderful time also, and I'm left with a number of rich memories that will stay with me:
- drinking too much wine with John Jarrold, Darren Nash and Bella Pagan, and hearing John sing a medley of songs from Guys and Dolls;
- marvelling at Charles Stross talking about the future, in his Guest of Honour Speech, with such effortless articulacy and attention to detail and casual charisma;
- listening spellbound to Neil Gaiman reading from his new novel, about a little orphan boy raised by ghosts;
- meeting the wonderful and very charming Tanith Lee, who is astonishingly young considering she's written nearly 100 books. Tanith admits that her writing method involves very little planning, and few revisions; her process is more like the 'channelling' experienced by a medium who is possessed by spirits than mere humdrum writing.
It's rare to meet so many engaging people in such a short space of time; and (as an avid reader of SF who has never been to a convention before) a pleasure to so quickly become part of that science fiction community. I'm looking forward to the next Eastercon already.
Great news for Ariel, the webguy who is the mentor and designer of this site...He's now been hired by Orbit in a senior capacity as a Marketing Executive, in recognition of his book-selling experience and exceptional online expertise.
And, over and above all else, Ariel aka Darren Turpin is a man who knows and loves his science fiction.
It's nice to see the good guys doing so well...
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.
There's a great site called Meet the Author in which you can watch clips of your favourite writers talking about their books. It features Gregory Maguire singing the title of his new book, Son of a Witch; and among the SF writers, my favourite clip features a barnstorming performance from Iain M. Banks.
I went along on Friday of last week to do my own 'piece to camera'. Strangely, I wasn't too nervous, largely because these days I never have time to get nervous (I used to spend days, nay weeks, getting nervous about things! Ah, happy times.)
And, though I'd mentally prepared a few things to say, I hadn't managed to write anything down. I thought, what the hell, I'll busk it. And, to my own considerable surprise, I began calmly, and spoke fluently, and didn't forget anything I wanted to say when suddenly
Nothing.
My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried'.
The very nice camera guy then explained I was way over length anyway - the ideal time for these things is 2 minutes, and I'd already passed the 6 minute mark, with footnotes and a prose poem sketch of my experiences running in Crystal Palace Park. So I gulped, resolved to be less verbose, and started again.
This time, I'm glad to say, I was far more economical. I got through about a minute and half's worth of chat effortlessly and then
Nothing.
My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried', for the second time.
This, have to say, is the moment when I realised when I could never be an actor. It's not just that I don't look right, and I can't act, and I get embarrassed in public, though those are major handicaps. It's my brain. It doesn't remember the end of things.
To be or not to be, that is the
Um? What comes next?
That would be me.
Interestingly, the art of classical rhetoric was very much concerned with the art of memory. Greek orators used to memorise their speeches by associating each section with their living room, as part of a visual mnemonic system. You start with the door, move across to the sofa; and when you reach the main part or 'focus' of your argument, you're at the fireplace. (The word 'focus' comes from the Greek word for 'hearth', for precisely this reason.)
I've never learned any such rhetorical tricks; I relied on luck to get my through, and luck failed me miserably.
By this point, furious and battle-scarred, I wanted to start the whole thing again; but the camera guy just got me to carry on from where I'd stopped. His plan is to edit it together seamlessly, but I'm convinced you'll be able to see a few seconds of dead air, and a panic-stricken writer with a fish-eye stare who has clearly had his data banks wiped.
In the interests of my own public mortification, I'll post a blog to say when the interview has gone online.
Great film! See it.
Imagine if you could travel anywhere, whenever you wanted.
It's that simple really. A science fiction extrapolation of the back-packer's wanderlust. You can travel to London, Rome, and Egypt - and still be home in time to watch your favourite show on telly.
There are villains, rather good ones, if dubiously motivated; and Samuel L. Jackson plays a bad guy with a scary haircut. But the real conflict is between two Jumpers, who bicker and end up having a fist fight that zaps exhilaratingly from location to location.
It's a film that has no resonance, and leaves no lasting insights or profundities in the mind. It's just - zap - zap - zap - great fun.
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.
Was the hype worth it? Is Cloverfield as scary as its trailer? (I was blown away when I first saw those wild hand-held camera images culminating in the head of the Statue of Liberty crashing to earth.)
Pretty much, I'd say. Cloverfield is great scary action, and has one nail-biting sequence that had my vertigo working overtime. I once walked up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and was appalled at how nauseous it made me feel - because of the lean, up and down didn't feel right and I was convinced I was falling. The Rescue Scene in Cloverfield had a similar effect on me.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie - it's brief, exciting, and exceptionally well shot. But I found in the end I resisted the central conceit - the idea that the whole movie we're watching is actual footage from a DV camera held by one of the characters. I'm not normally slow to withold my suspension of disbelief; but this was a step too far for me. A monster (no plot spoiler here, we all know this is a monster movie) is approaching, and you're running for your life - and you take time to pan the camera around to take in the view?
There was several points where only an utter lunatic would have carried on filming, and each of those moments kicked me out of the film.
I think the movie would have been stronger if it had just allowed us to imagine there really was a monster. The Bourne Supremacy has a similar, jittery hand-held camera feel throughout - but we never query that. It just feels natural, part of the movie's style.
And the restricted POV of the movie - we only see what our main characters see - was used to equally good effect in Spielberg's War of the Worlds without any need for explanation. The most chilling moment is when the Tom Cruise character sees bodies floating down the river; far more powerful visually than seeing the people being killed and becoming bodies...
But I did love the film's complete absence of exposition and narrative information. There's a great big monster - that's all we know. Is it an alien? Did it have a spaceship? We don't know; and we don't care.
Because it's coming for us and it's time to run...
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....
I saw I Am Legend last night. The reviews have been mixed, and I've read comments criticising the implausibility of the premise - if Will Smith is the only person in New York, where does the electricity come from?
But the film blew me away. Most SF movies are actually action movies, which are light on ideas, high on adrenalin. And this movie certainly delivers some great scary action sequences. But it's also a very brave piece of storytelling. For long long periods Will Smith is the only human being on screen, talking to his dog, living in a New York which is a wasteland inhabited by antelope and lions. And the film captures, beautifully, his despair, alienation, and growing madness. The man is so damn lonely it breaks your heart.
For reasons you'll discover when you see the film, New York is not a safe place to be in this (very near) future world. But though the Will Smith character is heroic and resourceful, he's not an exaggerated 'movie' hero. When he gets hurt, it hurts. He does stupid things. He exudes vulnerability. This is not The Matrix, where archetypal characters perform impossible deeds; it's an altogether more challenging piece of storytelling about a flawed and real central character. (And by the way, I love The Matrix!)
It made me think about the nature of the movie audience. We all know that Hollywood studios target their blockbuster at the 18-24 year old demographic; blockbuster movies are for 'the kids' (I have actually heard some producers use that phrase.) But as I recall (it's a long time ago!!!!) that period from 18 to 24 is very intense, emotionally and intellectually. At that stage in our lives, most of us are asking questions about identity, we have moments of loneliness and angst, and we have a burning curiosity about life, and its meaning, and whether it has a meaning. (And okay, partying and sex and drink and slacking come into the equation too....) But my point is, teenagers, and 18-24 year olds, think, and they think a lot, and they like movies which make them think.
The success of I Am Legend has been attributed to Will Smith's star power. And there's certainly some truth in that. But I think it's also successful because young audiences are up for seeing a movie which makes them imagine and then reflect on what it is like to be terribly, appallingly lonely.
The scenes of the desolate New York are superb. I was in Times Square very recently, so had a frisson at the scene where the antelope run past the poster of Legally Blonde.
I can't for the life of me remember if I've seen the Richard Matheson novel on which this is based. I suspect not, so I'll have to read it soon.
Answer to the question above, about the electricity: lots of buildings like hospitals have generators, so Will Smith must have installed a generator in his apartment block, fuelled by oil or some other easily available resource. The film doesn't bother to explain or show this, because it's a film - you can't waste time explaining every little thing! By the same token, no one tells us the lions have escaped from the zoo - but we, the audience, are smart, and we figure it out.
Critics can be so annoying sometimes....
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've just returned from New York...and it was an exhausting and exhilarating experience. We saw a Broadway show (Legally Blonde, which is brilliant and witty, and not just a lazy musical-of-the movie), ate in delis, stared at the neon lights of Times Square, walked in Central Park, and marvelled at the blend of courtesy and sophistication and tackiness and appalling bloody rudeness which defines the New York experience. (Next time, I'll take a scimitar to deal with those dratted New York cyclists.)
Perhaps the most remarkable place we saw was M & M World on Broadway, an emporium devoted to the worship of, er, M & Ms. You can buy M & M T shirts, M & M leather jackets, and of course, M & Ms. This is, don't forget, the only confectionery in the world which has a rap artist named after it.
Holidays with a child are of course based around the barter system - in return for going to M & M World and the playground in Central Park my wife and I were allowed to visit the Guggenheim and MOMA.
We also managed a visit to a bookshop, somewhere between Greenwich Village and Little Italy. And I realised there's an interesting contrast between the way US publishers sell SF and the way we do it in Blighty. Bluntly, it's about money - it costs twice as much to buy a large format paperback in the US as it is to buy the mass market edition. Here, the differential is much less - Debatable Space is being sold for £10 in January, and it'll cost something like £7 if you wait till later in the year.
So don't wait! Can I be any less subtle! Buy it right away!!!
Ooops, sorry about that lapse of authorial decorum, I'll blame it on the jet-lag. In the aforementioned bookshop, I found the large format version of Jeff Somers' The Electric Church, a matt edition not a gloss edition, but still with that same stunning cover . That book has (as Jeff pointed out in his response to one of my blogs) an excerpt from Debatable Space at the back. And the US large format paperback has an excerpt from The Electric Church.
I met my editor Tim and his New York team for lunch, and they talked a little bit about this new publishing initiative. The choices of excerpt are carefully made, and it's intended to be a friendly recommendation, not just a plug. And the inclusion of author's interviews and essays is an attempt to give novels the equivalent of DVD Extras.
It's all part of a general attempt to keep the novel format abreast of or ahead of the pack, up there with movies and DVD box sets. Pundits once predicted that books would become obsolete; instead, there are more bookshops than ever, and they are cooler, nicer places to be.
And the decline of the hardback format is, in my view, part of this same general renaissance in novel publishing. Hardbacks are beautiful, but way too expensive. No one I know ever buys hardback novels; and the whole notion of massively promoting a format no one will buy, and not having money left to promote the paperback a year later, is surely a holdover from the ancient times of publishing. Now, you can buy a book when it's first published, when it's first reviewed, and when it's first promoted.
My current crisis, by the by, is that I've run out of places to put my books. I either need an attic extension, or a spooky derelict house at the end of my road which I can break into and use as a book repository for all those paperback books I keep buying...