Category: Blog

I could, I suppose, pretend that the labours of the last month have been a hard slog, or that getting a 65,000 word novel out has been difficult. I could, but I won’t. PIRATES OF THE MOON has flooded out of me pretty much as quickly as I could type it, and although there’s a long way still to go before I consider it ready for a bigger audience than you, esteemed, Readership, I think in a lot of ways it’s the best thing that I’ve ever written.

Which is why I’m saddened to learn that according to some people, it will never get anywhere. Because it is utter, unashamed old school science fiction. It’s set on another planet. There are aliens. There are spaceships. There are robots. One of the main reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to write a story that harkened back to the stuff I loved as a kid, and still do now. It’s a very deliberate homage to authors like Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton and most importantly, a forgotten favourite, Brian Earnshaw and his Dragonfall 5 novels. These books were a massive influence on me when I was a kid, and Earnshaw’s idea of a space-faring family running a decrepit spacecraft came instantly to mind when I started hashing out the plot for Pirates.

But apparently no-one reads these kinds of books anymore. I had a Twitter and Livejournal chat yesterday with Adrian Faulkner, who is a thoughtful and perceptive writer of dark fantasy. He put me in the direction of a piece by Mark Charan Newton, who said just that. It’s here, and worth reading in full. And to an extent, I agree with him. Although good ole-fashioned space opera is booming on the big screen, fewer people are reading it. Or at the very least, not admitting to it.

And herein lies the problem. Proper wide-screen unrepentant space opera has a bit of an image problem. It’s viewed by the vast majority of the population as infantile, as a bit silly. It’s OK to watch Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica and enjoy it, but the idea of picking up a Midshipman’s Hope or Honor Harrington, or even perhaps a copy of Joe Haldeman or John Scalzi’s work seems to be beyond the pale. I’m not entirely convinced by this argument, especially when you look at the robust health of the fantasy market, and the Harry Potter fans and Twilight Moms who will happily read books that are badged and racked as Young Adult. I’ll admit, I have deliberately pitched PIRATES at this very market. Partially as an attempt to break into a burgeoning market, but also as an attempt to try to write something without any sex or swearing in it. That was a challenge, I can tell you.

I would say, though, that the idea that literary SF is dying out is just plain wrong. One particular, tiny facet of it may by in decline, but on the whole we are living in a time when SF novels have never been in such a strong and accepted position. Let us, for example, consider Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon, whose latest novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternate reality story that won the Hugo and the Nebula this year. Let us consider the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a bleak dystopian vision of a ruined earth. Margaret Atwood has been hilariously tying herself in conceptual knots for years by claiming that her stories of the future featuring clones and bio-engineering are not SF.

Going back to Mark Charon Newton’s piece, we can see that he too agrees that while what he calls “the core genre” is not doing so well, the tropes, imagery and themes of classic SF are alive and well and in the mainstream. He calls it appropriation. I call it assimilation. Let’s face it. We live in the 21st century. We live in a world where space travel is humdrum, where the planet is ringed with satellites. Where we can access more data than we could properly absorb in a lifetime on the bus, while listening to music and telling our mates what we’re up to all at the same time. A lot of what we’re living now was SF thirty years ago. So does this mean the genre is dead? No, of course not. SF has always been more a mirror to the world now than a vision of the future. At the moment, escapism is in, which is why fantasy is doing so well. And there’s another factor to consider.

Horror and fantasy fiction are both enjoying a resurgence off the back of the Young Adult market. Big, broad stroke movies and simple tales of magic and paranormal romance (shudder) have opened the market up in ways that could not have been imagined five years ago. It’s not going to take much for an SF story with the same broad appeal to have midnight openings at bookstores across the planet. My money is on Scott Westerfeld doing the business with the next book in his Uglies universe. And it’s telling that Stephenie Meyer’s latest book The Host is a story of good ole-fashioned alien Body-Snatching. That’s a sure way of getting the tweens and their moms off sparkly vampires and onto something with a little more (ahem) bite.

I’ll just sum up with a quote from Tamzin Outhwaite, star of the BBC show Paradox. This is a programme about an elite police squad that attempts in a Minority Report stylee, to solve crimes before they happen. She said:

Initially I thought it was a sci-fi project … Then I read the script and realised it wasn’t. It’s about police officers trying to work out whether there is a worm hole between two time zones.’

It does the old soul good to hear technobabble like that, it really does…

…and it looks like my hopes for continuing the story of the Armstrongs on the Moon will have to wait. At least for a while.

I have a day or so left to go on the first draft of PIRATES OF THE MOON, following which I will be jumping back into the dieselpunk world of Sohu, to complete the dark urban fantasy that I call THE PRISONER OF SOHO.

I’d like to give you a flavour of what you’ve voted for, so here’s a short extract. Our hero, Inigo Jones, has just been shoved through a portal that leads to … well, this.

He frowned up at the sky. It was an unhealthy turd-yellow, and black at the edges. It had been bleak and grey when he disappeared underneath Soho, but this looked more like sunset to Inigo. He checked the Nixon. That concurred with his internal clock.

12:23. No more that a couple of hours had passed since he had first met Litany, but there was a distinct chill in the air that slipped through his damp suit like a razor.

Something was not right at all. Further, there was something odd about the air. It smelt wrong somehow, even through the stink of garbage. It had a softness and a spiced fragrance to it that was utterly unlike the pissbeerrot stink that he found familiar. And there was music. A pulse. A beat that he knew. A skipping, skittering vibration that tangled up in his spine.

A shudder zapped up his spine. He suddenly felt very alone.

With his hand on his knife, he stepped out of Kraiey Court, and into another world.

Boulevard Francescu Bacon was wide, filthy and crammed with people. Porn shops, bars and strip joints lined both sides of the thoroughfare, while stalls selling clothing, knock-offs and hot snacks spilled off the pavements into the road. Traffic was a growl away from a snarl-up. Pedestrians and cyclists weaved through whatever gaps they could find.

There were no vehicles Inigo recognised. The street looked like three different car collector rallys all competing for the same exhibition space. There was nothing even remotely modern. Two-stroke powered Trabants thakkered their way through tiny gaps in the gridlock, while Morris Oxfords engaged in automotive combat with high-sided Bedford vans and the occasional tricked-out Wolseley. He could see nothing that dated any later than 1965. Adding to the carnage, sharp-dressed geezers on scooters buzzed through the throng, mounting the pavement if it made things easier. They scattered pedestrians as they went, screaming insults and jeering at the tops of their voices.

The noise was huge, filling Inigo’s head to straining point. Blatting horns provided a 4/4 kick overlaid with the shrill yelps of street vendors and the throb of over-revved engines. The battering thud of music blared from every open door, a wild mix that Inigo struggled to find familiar elements. Algerian rai was mixed in with Kodo drums, the sweet majesty of qawwali backed with the sonorous drone of Nepalese throat-singing, and somewhere at the back of it all, sweetening the mix, the same pulse, the same intoxicant throb of a backbeat, twisted through the mix like silver wire, the lost chord that tied everything together.

He swayed, dizzied by the noise, assaulted by the stench of petrol, hot fat and frying meat, a tang of decay that made his tongue arch. It was a Ridley Scott remix of “Absolute Beginners”. It was 50s Soho mashed together with 22nd century Algiers, coated in chilli paste and microwaved until it fizzed.

The buildings looked sort of familiar. To his left a narrow cylinder-ended construction reminded me of the Sun And 13 Cantons pub in Beak Street. Unlike the Sun, this building had been festooned in rickety neon signage, bilious pink worms of light that proclaimed … something … in a language that looked like a bastard mix of Pashtun and Cyrillic. Every building sported the same encrustation. Some had two-storey mediatronic screens flaring out commercials at blipvert speed. None of them touted a brand name Inigo recognised.

He stumbled backwards, eyes puppy-wide. He’d walked into some bizarre Arab-Stalinist version of Times Square, and it was squeezing his head out of shape.

You likee?

It’s December, for those of you who might not have noticed. The start of the Christmas month. Time to open the first door on the advent calendar. If you’re anything like my nephew Conor, it’s also time to open the second, third, fourth and fifth. Well, there is chocolate to be had.

And of course, the end of NaNoWriMo for another year. I finished on a bit of a high this year, getting sixty thousand words of a first draft out by ten pm yesterday at which point my brain and hands gave up and insisted I drink wine and watch the end of Face/Off.

But this is a great start. Notice the stress there. Most people doing Nano hammer away crazily for a month, then put what they’ve done away and don’t build on it. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. And it’s a waste. I reckon I have five grand left before I can stick “The End” on Pirates Of The Moon. Or in this case, “The Armstrongs, Arty and Quiddity will return…” in the best tradition of all the Bond movies.

Because the characters are growing and changing as I write them, and a continuation of the story is gathering at the back of my head even as I shape the end of the first place. I do believe I may have an honest to goodness trilogy on my hands.

However, first things first. Pirates gets done, and then I will honour the results of my poll and finish off another draft. At the moment my dieselpunk epic The Prisoner Of Soho is in the lead. I’ll keep the poll open until Saturday morning (at some point during Saturday Kitchen while Masterchef is on, probly) so get yer votes in if you want a say in what I do next!

It’s been a great November but time, and the writing, goes on.

Oh, and just so you don’t think it’s all wine and roses and happy creativity here, let’s finish with this year’s NanoSnark, from the brilliant Ariana Osbourne, which I love to bits because it absolutely PROVES MY POINT.

The caption says it all, really. Yesterday at about 3pm I finally hit the 50,000 word mark on Pirates Of The Moon, a moment that I marked by doing a little happy dance (certain members of the Readership will know exactly what form that dance takes. The rest of you will just have to imagine it) and then going out to buy cat food.

2009 is my fourth Nanowrimo and the one I have completed in the quickest time. I put this down to a couple of factors. Firstly, I had the idea early enough that I could properly plot it out. Although things were left loose enough so that the story still had room to take surprising twists and turns (one of the real joys of Nano is when the story or a character does something that you genuinely didn’t expect) the main story beats were set up so that I would never be stuck.

Secondly, the Nano community itself, more specifically the Oxfordshire forum to which I contribute, has been on fire this year, and encouraging each other to greater and higher excesses of word count. Several of the Oxfordshire nanos are at well over 150,000 words and still going strong. In that atmosphere you cannot help but thrive.

So. From here I have work to do. There’s Pirates to finish (I may have reached 50 grand, but Nano continues, no slacking) and then December, where I will carry the momentum into finishing one of my earlier, unfinished stories. Not sure which one yet. I know, how about a poll?

With two first drafts under my belt, I can then start polishing Pirates, and from there set up a rolling sequence whereby I can be working on either first draft or editing of SOMETHING. All of which requires writing to be done every day. Which was, after all, kind of the point to starting Nano in the first place.

And what will I be doing with all this writing?

Well, that’s an announcement for 2010. Let’s just say I’m looking at how TLC is using her e-reader with a great deal of interest…

…of the month, that is. Not the wordcount, which I’m pleased to report is… well, see for yourself. At the time of writing I am at the low thirty thousand mark.

Not the story either, which is looking to finish at the same kind of word count as Satan’s Schoolgirls. In other words, about 60,000 words, which is short but perfectly formed for a novel. Think the early novels of Elmore Leonard, or a lot of the classic pulp noirs. Or indeed the early novels of Robert Heinlein, which are the primary influence on “Pirates Of The Moon.” In the same way that I believe that 90 minutes is the perfect length for a film, I think 60 grand is the ideal word count for a quick cheap, fun book. The kind of story that Nanowrimo has always engendered in me.

So then, so far, so good. As usual, the story is moving and deepening in directions that I hadn’t considered when I was starting. The characters are taking over, doing and saying things that were never part of the plan. The villains have motives that I hadn’t considered. The heroes, especially my main character, the 14 year old space pilot Aurora Anderson, are more heroic and more human than I could have hoped.

 

I hope you’re having fun reading the first draft of the story. Because I’m having an absolute bloody BLAST writing it.

It’s November, and all over the world otherwise sane and normal souls are bent over laptops, hammering away at stories that up until now have lurked unwritten and unloved in corners and recesses of their hard-drives and notebooks.
It’s November, which for a community numbering over 100,000 people means one thing. It’s National Novel Writing Month. It’s time to write 50, 000 words in 30 days. It’s time to get that first draft done.
2009 is the fourth year I’ve done this. I’m the most prepared I’ve ever been. I have a story that is fully plotted and characters that are pretty well formed.
Traditionally this time of year is when my post rate to X&HT becomes even more erratic than usual. This year that will change. This year I’m posting everything I write for Nano on the site.
Please note a new tab on the header: PIRATES OF THE MOON: NANOWRIMO 2009. That is where each day’s word count will go as it’s finished. Call it a kind of online backup.
What you will see day on day is the raw output of the storytelling bits of my head. It might well be terrible. in fact it probably will be. It’s unfiltered, and will be full of cringeworthy dialogue, appaling metaphors, and barely understandable plot twists.
But, hey, I’m suffering this month. You may as well suffer with me.
Word count widgets will be going up on the site over the next day or so, along with someappropriate links to stuff that amuses me on the five minute’s web-browsing that I’ll manage to squeeze in each day.

Unelected plutocrat Peter Mandelson has pointed the way to a less free internet today, by announcing that Britain will be adopting an anti-filesharing piracy policy much like the one that has just been voted into legislation in France. This will take the form of two warning letters, followed by the cutting-off of persistent offenders.

The temptation to rant at length about the wrong-headedness of this ploy is almost too strong to resist, but I frankly don’t have the time. I’m in the throes of plot and prep for Nanowrimo, which begins this Sunday, and I’m off out to a meet with Dom for next weeks reshoots on Time Out. So I’ll limit this to a few questions about the policy, which I’m sure a lot of concerned citizens today are also asking.

1) If the so-called “persistent offender” is using a shared internet connection, say if they are one member of a family or household, what repercussions are there likely to be for the other, completely innocent members, using the same connection entirely legally?

2) It has been proven by internet provider Talk Talk that many broadband wireless connections in the UK are vulnerable to attack and exploitation by criminals who could download content illegally and leave the hapless subscriber to face the music. Or lack of, if they can’t get to their Spotify subscription anymore. What safeguards are the government planning on putting into place to ensure that the name on the bill is the person doing the dirty download?

3) How is this new policy to be policed and enforced? If I was found guilty of downloading, for example, what would stop me from taking a laptop into my local Starbucks and accessing the web from there? Or buying a 3G dongle, or using an iPhone connection, or simply sniffing out someone else’s connection and jumping on that? Short of removing all web-accessible devices from my home (and good luck wresting TLC’s Macbook or iPhone from her, BTW) how could you possibly stop me?

That’s three. Like I say, I could go on. The whole idea is simply stupid. Stupid, and doomed to failure. Oh, and according to the Times this morning, liable to create a major security risk too. Ha.

I don’t often watch Newsnight Review these days. It’s been a bastion of the worst of contemporary cultural snobbery for quite a while, and would just wind me up into a fury that’s really not good for the soul at half eleven on a Friday night.

However, last night featured the mighty Kevin Smith, in town for signings of his new book and a short spoken word tour, so I figured it was worth tuning in. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that the programme was specially themed around the idea of geek power. I instantly sat up and started paying attention. They were talking about my people, and what is more, not talking down to or condescending them.

Items on the Booker SF row, the prelevance of comics (well, more specifically, the superhero) in popular culture, and the role of the fan nowadays were dealt with humourously, and with a great deal of charm by the panel and Kirsty Wark, MCing with a great deal more empathy than she had shown to the two MPs she had been yelling at moments previously.

Joining Kirsty and Kevin were comedian Nathalie Haynes and author Jeanette Winterston. Here’s the first interesting thing. A panel on geek culture that’s three-quarter female? The one bloke on the panel admitting at one point that he is “barely male?” This reflects, to me, the sea change that is starting to take place. It’s OK to be a geek now. Girls can be geeks to, and in fact will revel in their status. Natalie, in particular was going full out to prove her geek creds, bouncing around the cultural signifiers with a barely concealed glee. More importantly, everyone on the panel was having fun. It was a riotous assembly of clever and outspoken commentators, and wildly entertaining.

The one problem for me was the material the producers chose to illustrate some of the points the panel had to make. Now, I know the show’s called Newsnight Review, and that it should be looking at art and media released that week. But focussing time on Eion Colfer’s Hitchhiker’s fanfic And Another Thing (as disappointing as post-Fleming Bond, or the painful rooting through Frank Herbert’s file cabinet that his son Kevin has done) seemed a bit of a waste, when I would have much rather heard more about the book Kim Stanley Robinson thought should have won the Booker, or even whether Jeanette Winterston agreed that the Booker is now perfectly accepting of genre books, as long as they are historical novels.

I would have widened the remit out some more, and talked about Micheal Chabon, who has won both the Pulitzer and the Hugo. Or looked at Iain Banks’ new novel which finally seems to be blurring the boundary between his mainstream and Culture novels. There was a fascinating discussion waiting in the wings that was never called out to camera.

Worse, using Mark Millar’s absurd adolescent power fantasy Kick-Ass as some kind of examplar of the way comics are now was just plain dumb. Jeanette, bless her heart, clearly doesn’t read many comics, and she rightly recoiled from this one. As well she might. A book whose principal female character is a homicidal eight-year-old with twin Samurai swords is hardly going to draw her into the fold. I couldn’t agree with Kevin or Natalie at this point, no matter how vehemently they argued that it was cool or fun. Or worse, how Kevin plans to take his ten year old, the brilliantly named Harley Quinn, to see it and cover her ears at the swears while making sure she sees the gore. A bit disingenuous, this, coming from one of the sweariest men on the planet.

The choice of Kick-Ass was not only poor, it was lazy. The final part of Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary was finally released this week after a three year wait. This would have been a much more interesting title to review. It works both as a brilliant adventure story, and a wide-ranging allegory that in equal parts satirises and skewers the all-encompassing hold the superhero has on mainstream comics. A far cleverer, far more interesting choice, to my mind.

However, I’m grumbling about things beyond my control, and on the whole I was surprised and delighted with the quality of discussion on a show that I would normally go out of my way to avoid. In a week when one of the Booker Judges claimed that SF fans hid in small rooms doing special, weird things, Newsnight Review came right out and showed what a ridiculous, blinkered statement that was. More like this, please, BBC!

When I was growing up, a popular refuge/meeting place/night out was the cinema that lived on Hoe Street in Walthamstow. It started off as a Granada, before becoming in short order a Cannon, an ABC and finally an EMD. It was a home from home during some of the toughest years of my adolescence, a place where I could be myself.

It helped that it was a proper, booming DecoGothic pile of a place, with a double-tongued swoop of a staircase up to the mezzanine level, and famous red and gold Moorish architecture, the work of Theodore ‘Komis’ Komisarjevsky, the man credited with bringing Chekhovian theatre to England. It was a palace of dreams and nightmares, a place where I fell in love with the films of John Carpenter, American wine gums and, for a while at least, a girl called Tracy Gilbert.

In 2003, after a disastrous stint as a Bollywood-only cinema, it was bought at twice market price by the controversial United Church of The Kingdom of God. They immediately shut it and declared their intention to turn it into a church. This move, which rendered the London Borough of Waltham Forest the only one in London without a working cinema, provoked an immediate and ferocious backlash, which spiralled up from a bunch of passionate local activists to the attention of the deputy Prime Minister at the time. The campaign worked. The cinema remained, unusable as a church, with owners unwilling to reinstate it to it’s former glory.

This year, the church reapplied for permission to retask the building. They have clearly been doing some work behind the scenes, as there are prominent members of Waltham Forest Council backing their scheme.

Fortunately, the original group of protesters, the McGuffins, have not been quiet either. Over the past few months they have been making it clear exactly what is at stake, and what Walthamstow will lose if the UCKG get their way. There is an enormous groundswell of opinion that it makes huge financial and cultural sense to restore this beautiful grade II* listed building to it’s original purpose, and get people watching films in Walthamstow again. Alfred Hitchcock used the cinema as a kid, and if it’s good enough for him…

So. To action. Waltham Forest Council are taking objections to the UCKG’s scheme until this Friday the 25th September, which is shockingly short notice, I know, but to my shame I only found out about the plans today, and then purely by chance. The time to act, unfortunately, is now.

The McGuffins have all the details here.

There’s a Facebook page. Of course there’s a Facebook page. There’s ALWAYS a Facebook page.

Got all that. Get to it, then. Walthamstow needs you.