I’ve just been proof-reading ARTEMIS, which is my fifth novel for Orbit Books, and is published later this year. And I had a bit of a ‘wow’ moment.

Wow!

Four of these novels are set in the same universe as DEBATABLE SPACE, what I might call the ‘Lena-verse’. DS itself spans at least a thousand years; and in the other books I range widely through time and galaxies. There’s a complex chronological relationship, which I’ve described elsewhere as a triptych; now it’s a triptych in four parts. (Thanks Douglas!) The events of RED CLAW happen DURING the events of DEBATABLE SPACE. ARTEMIS comes next, though it hasn’t been published yet; then VERSION 43.  Is that clear?  Um…

HELL SHIP however is set in a myriad other universes – all the characters are alien to us, and to each other. Again, aeons elapse in the course of the story. Immense battles take place; and, as I keep proudly telling people, more characters die in HELL SHIP than in the rest of the English literature put together.

But for all the interplanetary carnage, genocide, and shoot ‘em up encounters, these books for me are all about the characters. So here’s my potted A-Z guide of some of the people (by which I mean humans, genetically modified humans and aliens) who populate these five novels.

A is for Artemis. Artemis McIvor is the protagonist and (arguably) heroine of the novel called ARTEMIS. She’s a rebel, a stone cold killer and a bibliophile, who leaves the library planet of Rebus to pursue a life of adventure, murder, and crime. Artemis has kickassitude, poor manners, and a passionate personality.

ARTEMIS IN ACTION: ‘ “Kiss my finger,” I told the six mollyfockers, calmly and quite politely.’

A is also for Alliea, one of Flanagan’s crew in DEBATABLE SPACE.  Feisty, cheeky, fearless; named after a good pal of mine who is all of those things, but not a pirate.

ALLIEA’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE: ‘That was the buzz. Risk everything. Live for the moment.’

A is also for Alby, the blues-loving superintelligent flame beast who also features in DS.

ALBY WAXING LYRICAL, SIBILLANTLY: ‘I mussse, for a while, at the infinite folly and entertaining variety of humankind. Then I feel a flicker of weariness, and I die.’

A is also for Andrei, the love of Lena’s life, in DS.

A is also for Aretha, the uniform cop in Version 43 who mocks and taunts Version 43, but eventually comes to fight side by side with the Cyborg Cop against the bad guys.  ’Sergeant Jones sat in the black armchair. She stared up at me. I stared back. She was rather beautiful, I observed, despite being, to put it mildly, a stranger to fashionable skinniness.’

A is also for Albinia, the beautiful Olaran Star-Seeker who communes with the Explorer craft in HELL SHIP and yearns to experience love.  ’ ” I fear that I’ve lost my olarinity,” said Albinia.’

(What can I say – I love ‘A’!)

B is for Baal, as in Hugo Baal. Hugo is a minor character and co-narrator of RED CLAW; but for my money, HE’S the hero. He’s tubby, swotty, nerdy, and addicted to footnotes.1 But he’s redeemed by his passion for science and  nature; for Hugo is a xenobiologist who is blessed to live in the Golden Age of naturalism, where millions of new species, and hundreds of new  sentient species, are being discovered somewhere, by someone, every day.

EXTRACT FROM HUGO’S DIARY:

‘This has been a ghastly period. Many of my friends are dead. We face, I believe, certain death on this godforsaken planet, pursued by monsters, led by fools. I am fatigued beyond all measure, my arse stings because I just  accidentally kicked over a carton of sulphuric acid near the toilet hole just as I was voiding myself, and I am bored and angry and frustrated.

But none of this matters. I am the first to find the New Amazonian octopod.

And I can hardly speak for joy.’

B is also for Brandon, one of  Flanagan’s crew in DEBATABLE SPACE. Another nerd; I truly love nerds.2  Brandon is the kind of obsessive who names his watch. ‘People, by the way, tell me I’m weird. I guess I am.’

B is also for Bompasso; John Bompasso is one of the three inventors of quantum teleportation, as explained in VERSION 43; and is  the only one who avoids dying a horrible death as a consequence (though he IS laterally inverted). He doesn’t feature as a character but VERSION 43 features as an afterword his paper on the principles of quantum teleportation, which is rich in bile.

B is also for Beebe, as in William and Mary Beebe, scientists who  feature in RED CLAW. My books often contain evil cruel characters; but these two are the kind of people I WOULD like to share an alien planet with.  They’re good people; there really are some out there.

THE BEEBES DISCUSSING THE ALIEN BUTTERFLY-BIRD:

‘”Beautiful,” murmured Helms, entranced.

“Yes but,” mused William, “why? Why do they fly at all?”

“Indeed,” said Mary.

“Since they don’t need to,” William added unnecessarily.

Mary sighed; and William repented of his unnecessary words.

Helms realised: these two didn’t fully realise he was there, so lost were they in their rapport.’

B is also for Billy, who will feature in ARTEMIS. (Not yet published).

C is for Cheo; the Chief Executive Office of the Galactic Corporation, which means he is the darkest of villains. He is the major antagonist in DEBATABLE SPACE; the off-page antagonist of RED CLAW. The Cheo is also a character we get to know in some detail from Lena’s thought-diary in DS; but to say more would be to risk spoilers.

C is also for Cuzco, a major character in HELL SHIP; angry, cantankerous, and huge; a dragon-like beast with two torsos whose species used to enjoy eating sentient bipeds; a great friend to have, if he doesn’t eat you.

CUZCO. REFLECTIVE:   ‘ “I did not know a parent could love a child, and a child a parent, until I came to this place.” ‘

SAI-IAS DESCRIBING CUZCO: ‘like a cloud of golden armour made up of hope and poetry.’

D is for Doro, a shapeshifting alien in HELL SHIP; he is very strange.

D is also for Djamrock, a magnificent giant sentient, also to be found in HELL SHIP.

E is for Explorer 410; this is the spaceship commanded by Jak in HELL SHIP, which has a mind, and maybe even a personality, of its own.  ’Revenge is not enough, Star-Seeker Jak. Someone must bear witness to that revenge.’

F is for Flanagan, the anti-hero of DEBATABLE SPACE; a pirate who beheads an innocent ship’s captain to prove a point, and kidnaps Lena; a rude vulgar and opinionated chap; who is also the only man in the universe with the balls to defy the Cheo’s regime.

LENA TO FLANAGAN: ‘ “You are seduced, awestruck, pitiful,” I tell him, with relish. “I humour you but, in truth, I despise you.”‘

ON FLANAGAN IN A DOPPELGANGER BODY: ‘I glance at Flanagan, with his grizzled hair and fierce eyes. At my instructions, the beard has gone. He looks younger somehow. And his body is stretched out, arms ahead, rocket pack on his back. He is the very image of the ageing Superman returning from a trip to the stars.’

F is also for Fray, a vast rhino-like beast who is a major character in HELL SHIP; the Frayskind like to eat their young; they fart often; and the earth shakes when they run; but Fray has a big heart, metaphorically and literally.

F is for Fernando Gracias, one of the gangsters who runs Lawless City in VERSION 43.

F is also for Filipa; the barmaid from Hecate, who features in VERSION 43.

G is for Grendel, a pirate chief based in the outlaw region known as Debatable Space, who joins forces with Flanagan.

G is also for Grogan, in particular Billy Grogan; a gangster in VERSION 43; a bad man, but we like him anyway.

G is also for Galamea, the Commander of the Explorer craft which features in HELL SHIP; a tough and ruthless leader, who yearns to be treated as an equal by a male of her species; rather than as a goddess, which is what tends to happen.

GALAMEA WITH JAK, WHILE IN HEAT:

‘ ” I will never,” said Galamea, “need a male ever again!”

Her body was trembling with repressed passion.I was awed at the strength of will she was displaying in refusing my offer.’

H is for Hooperman, one of the major characters in RED CLAW. He’s a typical scientist; brilliant, nerdish, evil, and manipulative. And, oh yes, inspired by the love of knowledge. He is the author of Hooperman’s Tree of Life; the second best (according to Carl Saunders) guide to alien life ever written.

H is also for Harry, a genetically engineered Loper – think mane and claws – who serves with Flanagan as a pirate and rebel.

‘And when I run I forget all my doubts and regrets. All my hesitations and pauses. All my uncertainties. All my fears. I run, I am the run, the run is me.

I am complete.’

H is also for Hari Gilles; one of the gangsters who runs Lawless City in VERSION 43.

H is also for Hera, who narrates a story in DEBATABLE SPACE; for all the jokes, this is a serious book, and this is the most serious bit.

H is also for Heath, as in Sheriff Heath; he’s a lawman who lives in Lawless City; which pretty much tells you he’s wasting his time. Sheriff Heath is one of the small team assembled by the Cyborg Cop in VERSION 43, to fight the bad guys.

I is for Isaac, another major character in RED CLAW. He’s a sentient alien bird-like creature of the Gryphon species who dwells on the planet of New Amazon; smart and sweet and (in my view) cuddly; his kind have a VERY bizarre way of giving birth.

J is for Jamie, a man in the body of a child, and one of the crew members in DEBATABLE SPACE  ’What a fucking mess I just caused! What a total gross-out fucking up of reality!’

J is also for Jak, one of the three narrators of HELL SHIP. He an elegant and beautiful humanoid alien belonging to a species, the Olara, who adore beauty and trading in equal measure; the female Olarans are vastly more intelligent than the males, and the men know their place.  (Much like my house.)

‘After five days in the simulacrum tank, I was stiff and muscle-wasted and yearned to lie down and die. But I pushed myself hard, shaking out my shoulder muscles, and turning my head – with a satisfying crack of my neck vertebrae – in a perfect circle, to get it nicely limber.’

K is for Kalen, a genetically modified ‘cat-person’, who serves on Flanagan’s crew in DEBATABLE SPACE. Miaow.

K is also for Kim Ji, a gangster who features in VERSION 43.

THE CYBORG COP’S TAKE ON KIM: ‘I noted that Kim’s hair was red like flames…Kim was, in summary, a woman of considerable beauty. I was fully aware of this datum.’

K is also for Kirkham, as in Dr Ben Kirkham; a Scientist in Red Claw who is the epitome of a snide vicious psychopath; and not at all the person you’d want to be trapped with on an alien planet.

‘ “Don’t you be fucking whatchmacall with me,” Sorcha snarled.

“Do you mean perhaps ‘ironic?’ Ah I think you do.”  Then Ben did a rapid double take of shock and horror. “Me? Ironic? Heaven forbid!”

Sorcha felt like punching him.’

L is for Lena, the anti-heroine of DEBATABLE SPACE. She’s vain, deceitful, selfish, sometimes cowardly, and she tells fibs (even though she’s our narrator.) Some might hate her; I love her; it’s was Lena’s sarcastic voice that pulled me into DEBATABLE SPACE and gave me the entire novel; I channelled the mind and emotions of an evil bitch who was born in the very early years of the 20th century,  my entire career as a science fiction novelist arose from that. (By the way, I’m very strange; I actually believe my characters are real people.)

FLANAGAN ON LENA:

‘She is very opinionated about everything. Society has decayed. Courtesy is a forgotten  art….She is in short, old. She’s selfish, self-contained, cautious, cowardly, bigoted, small-minded, self-pitying, spoiled, self-indulgent, arrogant, uninterested in the feelings of others…she is cocooned.’

PHILIP ON LENA: But she’s also, thanks to rejuve, extremely hot.

L is also for Lirilla, a sweet bird-type  who appears in HELL SHIP.

M is for Monroe; Admiral Monroe no less, who serves in the Cheo’s Navy and is eaten arsehole-first by a sentient hive-mind creature and finds himself trapped in the thought bubbles which comprise one entire narrative strand of VERSION 43. Okay, yeah, these books are maybe a BIT strange.

M is for Morval, a seasoned Explorer who is old and bald with eyes like black holes, and features in HELL SHIP.

JAK ON MORVAL:  ’This wizened old spacefarer had skin like withered hide, and a scowl that made me shudder.  I conjured up my most charming smile, and vowed never to let myself become so decrepit.’

M is also for Macawley, a hospital receptionist in VERSION 43; a minor character who is a cat-person and who (to my utter astonishment, but hey, these characters have minds of their own) turns out to be one of the major protagonists in the battle against the bad guys. ‘And Macawley laughed, and her green eyes glittered and she opened her mouth and her teeth were sharp points, and she hissed, and then she roared a perfect roar.’

M is also for McCoy, as in Private Clementine McCoy; one of the nicer characters in RED CLAW.  Hugo Baal writes of her: ‘And, I must concede, I’m fond of Clementine. There’s a wonderful quality to her, and she’s an undeniably attractive young woman. And to be perfectly honest, I never thought that a girl like that would look at a tubby and annoying little geek like me.’

M is for Mia, as in Mia Nightingale; a documentary film-maker making a movie about genocide of aliens, in RED CLAW.

M is also for Minos; read HELL SHIP to know more.

N is for Naurion, as in Mayor Abraham Naurion, who runs Lawless City in Version 43.

O is for Olara; not a character, but a species to which Jak belongs. So that’s cheating really. Go on – sue me!

P is for Phylas, a young naive  Explorer who features in HELL SHIP.  ’ ” Occasional comments of mine have not always, um, accorded with common sense.” ‘

Q is for Quipu, a three-headed superintelligent alien who features in HELL SHIP; whose favourite pastime is arguing with himselves.

R is for Roger Layton, saviour of humankind, who will feature in ARTEMIS.

S is for Saunders, as in Professor Carl Saunders, one of the greatest xenobiologists of all time, author of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ALIEN LIFE.  See RED CLAW.

S is for Sai-ias, one of the three narrators of HELL SHIP. She is kind, and funny, and generous, and big-hearted; and would be my ideal of the perfect woman if it weren’t for the fact she is vast, carapaced, with tentacles. An alien, in short.

‘And so I resolved to change my world.  Instead of fighting, I would make peace. Instead of hating, I tried to spread love.

And I was mocked for it.’

S is for Sharrock, who also narrates some of HELL SHIP. He’s a warrior in the Conan mould, from a civilisation which has sword fighting but can also travel the stars. Sharrock is humanoid, but has red skin with ridges; and a fearsome temper.

SAI-IAS ON SHARROCK: ‘Sharrock had a way of being still in a fashion that conveyed boundless inner energy; he reminded me of the many four-legged predators that stalked through the forest, who lived only to hunt.’

S is also for Sorcha, as in Major Sorcha Molloy, the ruthless Soldier in RED CLAW; she has been bred for war, brainwashed into unthinking obedience to the Galactic Corporation; and HATES nerdy Scientists. ‘Sorcha was ten years old when she killed her first man….And so, and then, her childhood ended.’

T is for Tinbrain, the Earth’s quantum remote computer, which Lena is able to access with her thoughts in DEBATABLE SPACE.

T is also for Tonii, as in Private Tonii Newton; an hermaphrodite Soldier (well endowed in every way) in RED CLAW.

T is also for Teresa Shalco, capobastone of Giger Pentientiary, in ARTEMIS.

U is for Um, let me get back to you on that.

V is for Version 43. Version 43 is a cyborg cop, who features in the novel called, er, VERSION 43. He has the intellect  and body of a robot, but the personality of a human being; and  no memories of who he once was.

V is also for Vishaal; one of the bad guys in VERSION 43. A truly evil awful person; and older than he looks.

W is for Wong-Kei, a gangster defeated by Lena in DEBATABLE SPACE.

X is for Xabar, which for complicated reasons, is what Lena Smith once called herself.

Y is for – um, I don’t seem to have ever written a character beginning with ‘Y’!

Z is for Zala, who fights Sharrock in Chapter 1 of HELL SHIP.

1 Not a bit like me!

2 Though I’m not a nerd myself, of course. Harumph.

It’s a bleak time – it’s not so long ago Books Etc and Borders were thriving and now both have gone. Waterstone’s is still standing but is going through a rocky patch.  And with e-book sales booming, one can’t help but wonder if this will be the end of the traditional bookshop.

But if so – does that matter? Isn’t this just evolution in action?  Frankly, on the basis of the account above, Barnes & Noble DESERVE to go under.  And if they do, smarter people will set up bookshops that customers CAN use.  That’s how capitalism works; survival of the most shopped-at.

Of course, I love bookshops.  For me bookshops are the equivalent of pool-halls; they are the places where I misspent my youth, in a totally uncool and unrebellious fashion.  But I have to admit, it’s a while since I’ve been in a bookshop. The last time was a month ago, in Oxford, when I popped in to the best bookshop in the world – Blackwell’s on the High.  Floors and floors of magnificent books! This is a shop that was terrific even BEFORE Waterstone’s pioneered nice shops with coffee shops. (Blackwell’s doesn’t have one of those, but it does have a pub next door when I misspent many of my University years.)

But the cruel truth is – if bookshops die out, IT’S ALL MY FAULT. Yes, I personally will be totally to blame; along with all the others like me who are hooked on Amazon.

Amazon!  It’s the Devil isn’t it? All that power.  It’s like Starbuck’s, if Starbuck’s sold all the coffee in the world.  But it works. I bought 3 books on Amazon last week in about 30 seconds.  I saw a Dan Abnett (Embedded) in the Dealer’s Room at Eastercon, being sold at the Angry Robot stall by my pal Lee Harris and I thought – must buy that on Amazon where it’ll be two or three quid cheaper. So I did!  Thus chiselling Lee, Dan, and the entire imprint out of a few vital pence of profit. 

Then, also on that same day last week, I saw Adam Roberts’ name on a blog, and I thought – must buy New Model Army, which I saw in Waterstone’s recently, but it’ll be cheaper on Amazon! So I did.  I also bought another book. I’ve no idea what it is.  It came in the post yesterday in a brown parcel.  I get post!  I can’t tell you how much I enjoy getting post, and now rarely a day passes without Amazon packages arriving.

This is BETTER THAN GOING TO BOOKSHOPS.  Instead of indulging my ‘browsing in bookshops’ addiction, I am indulging my ‘getting lots of post’  addiction.  And, as I’ve indicated, if you browse in bookshops but THEN buy on Amazon,  you get the best of both worlds.

But, of course, bookshops will go out of business.

I can still remember WHY I switched my allegiance to Amazon.  It wasn’t to buy fiction books – because this was at a stage when my conscience wouldn’t have allowed such a thing. No it was the day I got a letter from Tom Stoppard (swank, swank, what a name dropper I am!) which was in fact a mass circular sent to all the members of the London Library, explaining why the subscription had to go up a zillion per cent. 

Now for those not familiar with it, the London Library is a sacred institution, as hallowed as the British Museum and the National Gallery. It’s not a public body; it’s a private lending library, based in St James’ s Square in London, and is the first port of call for many writers researching their novels and non-fiction books.  The site is vast, the building is old and beautiful, and it’s a richly anachronistic place. In fact, because the filing system was never updated, the geography section is still divided up into Bosnia, Serbia etc – BECAUSE THEY NEVER BOTHERED CHANGING IT WHEN YUGOSLAVIA WAS CREATED.  Now that’s just cool.  Television writer John Wilsher (who I worked with on The Bill many years ago) did a fabulous episode of New Tricks set in the London Library. If you go there often enough, you’ll meet P.D. James in the lift.  (She spends her days there, going up and down.)

And for years I used this library as my resource for non-fiction books – historical books (on Marco Polo, Newton etc etc), science books, philosophy books, crime books, you name it.  The subscription was a couple of hundred pounds a year but you could keep the books for as long as you liked.  So it was convenient, cheap; and it made me feel like a real writer.

Then the (cloth-headed) decison was made to double the subscription, but with a special clause whereby ‘deserving’ writers who weren’t earning much could get a discount.  How Dickensian!  And I thought – sod this.  And I started getting all my non-fiction on Amazon – often second hand.  I’ve now got towers of books in my study on Iraq, Nazi Germany, serial killers, demonology, you name it  - and they’re cheap, I get to own them, and ordering couldn’t be more convenient.

But in the process, I lost a bit of magic; the London Library magic. 

And now I’m using Amazon for fiction, I’ve forgotten the joy of browsing in bookshops and actually buying books there.  I’ve sold my soul to that old devil Amazon.

My fault! All my fault…!

By the way, copies of Debatable Space, Red Claw, Version 43 and Hell Ship are available here!

The FT.com website has a summary version of the feature, here.

This page was originally set up when my first novel, er, Debatable Space was published; now many books later, it has been renamed as:

PHILIP PALMER’S DEBATABLE SPACES

Consider it the Facebook manifestation of this site; it gives a very visual feed for all the blogs published here, and there’s a small and loyal core of site users who keep the page active.  In future, I’ll be using the page for news bulletins (WROTE ANOTHER THIRTY WORDS TODAY! That kind of riveting material.  Plus bits of news, and maybe the occasional free gift.

I signed a batch of copies, and even if you don’t live in the Fresh Air Suburb of Crystal Palace you can get a copy from Crow by using their cunning online order service. 

There may also be some kind of Version 43 signing event at Crow in the not too distant future…

At the end of the second day, I did a reading from Version 43 which was a pleasure and, frankly, a surprise. I wrote it ages ago and had almost forgotten what it was like!

For a flavour of the book, here’s the extract posted on the Orbit website.

But if you have a fondness for the universe of Debatable Space, and you happen to be anywhere near a glass of alcohol tonight (and why wouldn’t you be?) do raise a glass to the new book:  Version 43. I certainly shall…

I came home to watch the latest installment in the Palmer/Somers tapes…some very entertaining stuff here, and Jeff is a dab hand at pretending to be a sad loser. 

Here’s the vid:

Enjoy!

Do you know what, I think Jeff IS better looking than me. Damn!

It looks great – a wonderful cover design, and some marvellously clever layout choices which convey on the page the mental workings of the strange aliens I have created. 

This is a pulp noir novel set in a far future universe; and Version 43, the narrator, is a hard-boiled detective in cyborg form. 

Here’s the cover:

It’s been a crazy few months – writing, reading, meeting old friends,  more writing, and some potentially exciting new developments on my Welsh film noir Inferno.  Watch this space.

I’m now anticipating the release of my latest Orbit novel Version 43 on the 7th October; I’ll be going to Newcon on the 9th and 10th of October.  And at the end of October, I’ll be back in the BBC Radio recording studio for my new 5 part thriller The Art of Deception: Part 2.

I’ve also been doing a little bit of collaborating with fellow Orbit writer Jeff Somers, who supplied the wonderful SFF Song of the Week you can see below.  Jeff is one of the smartest coolest writers around, and I’m a big fan of his Avery Cates novels; his latest, The Terminal State, is released this month and in my view it’s his best yet.

The guys at Orbit decided it would be cool for Jeff and I to do some joint marketing for our books, so over the last few months we’ve been supplying interviews and other stuff about our work; and also attempting to compare the relative merits of our respective noir protagonists, namely Version 43 (me) and Avery Cates (Jeff). 

I haven’t seen the final results yet, but I think it all went very well.  I am, as I say, a great fan of Jeff’s work – though I don’t accept the persistent rumour that he’s better looking than me  – nor do I accept that his protagonist is tougher than mine – and in my comments I’ve attempted to be firm but fair in response to the sometimes rather provocative questions posed by the Orbit team, and by director Christine Lalla. 

So as I say, I think Jeff and I reveal ourselves to be very fair-minded generous chaps – but you can judge for yourself.

PS Can you believe this guy??????!!!!!?????

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!

I’ve been longing to share this for some time – and here it see. Lauren Panepinto’s cover design for my next book Version 43 (available in all good bookshops from October; or if you telephone me, I’ll sell it to you a word at a time.) 

Lauren has written some lovely stuff about her approach to this cover, and the whole issue of an author’s ‘look’.  (In reality: scruffy, & ill coordinated – but I think she means the books).

Now I want to see the book on some actual shelves…

With my third novel Version 43, I took a step forward in time from the events of Debatable Space and Red Claw, to a future world where all is peace and harmony, and there is no crime or injustice.

And then I thought – phooey! – and created the Exodus Universe, where all the outlaws and misfits and bad guys live. Much more my style.

In this lawless realm, the law is enforced by a small team of cyborg cops.  And our hero is one such – known as the Cop. 

This book grew out of my love of crime thrillers and pulp noirs, including and especially the books of the great Dashiell Hammett, whose Continental Op rivals Sam Spade, and could knock spots off Philip Marlowe. 

But this is not a crime novel with a few SF trappings – it’s very much rooted in its strange future world. 

Here’s a visual sample of the scary, genre-mashing dystopic vision that is Version 43.   Don’t take the images too literally – this is what’s called in the film business a ‘mood  board’.  These are images which inspired me, or spoke to me, or which resonated with me for reasons that aren’t entirely logical.

And you can find out more about Version 43 when it’s published, in autumn 2010.