Interviews & Links
There’s a brief chat with me over at Rowena Cory Daniels’ blog, in which I say Many Things, and talk a little bit more about the new series:
The lead character, Lucan Drakenfeld, is a bit like a young lawyer-slash-detective, and certainly the polar opposite of a private eye (if anything, he’s a public eye). I’m really trying to steer away from noir pastiche because I feel that would be disrespectful to crime readers. The book is as much a crime novel as it is a fantasy novel. Imagine a mainstream writer trying their hand at a fantasy novel, and filled it with a paint-by-numbers story – they’d be strung up by the fanbase, which is why I’m not doing a paint-by-numbers crime novel, either.
There’s a video interview with my agent, John Jarrold, for those of you who are interested in tales and tips of publishing.
And I review a book about making compost for the Ecologist. More interesting than you might think…
The City & The Corporation
The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London’s mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.
- George Monbiot writing in the Guardian.
Great to see lots of stuff finally being aired about the City of London Corporation, something which I blogged about earlier in the year.
Amazon vs Publishers
The New York Times asks if Amazon will kill of book publishers:
Traditional publishers, unfortunately, don’t have a relationship with the reader — or if they do, it’s extremely tenuous. Ask most consumers what publishers their favorite authors are aligned with, and 9 out of 10 couldn’t tell you. If you don’t have a relationship, you can be cut out, and this is what Amazon knows and what writers are learning.
Well that’s clearly bollocks, as anyone in the genre will tell you, but I think there’s something to be said about Amazon’s clout in cutting out the middle man:
Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.
Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.
Publishers aren’t allowed to share what’s on the Amazon rate card (what they charge publishers to promote their books), but the costs run into the thousands for sending out customer emails, putting books in prominent places, and so on. Standard industry practice, of course. They charge publishers to do this because they can, and what’s the alternative? Let books die without exposure? Exactly.
And rates go up each year (times are tough, after all). The danger of this is that writers become less and less profitable for publishers – which means, when it comes to accountancy time, if the numbers don’t add up for said writer… You get the idea. But I suppose if Amazon are cutting out publishers, we don’t have to worry about the numbers game.
Amazon have long held the upper hand against bookstores, too: it’s much more cost-effective when you don’t have to pay for walls, staff etc, in quite the same way. They able to undercut publishers on price in the ebook business (some might say it devalues the physical product, though not quite as much as piracy and the expectation of books being free – but that’s another rant entirely). So with fewer bookstores, that means more people turn to Amazon. It means publishers will need to spend more money with Amazon, too.
Amazon are also cleverly seducing self-published authors into marching in time with the corporate giant, as it’s clearly far simpler to upload your work to Kindle then going through the hoops that traditional publishing presents. This is doubly clever because it means thousands of indie writers are all singing the praises of Amazon, and pointing people their way.
I’m not complaining about any of this – it’s all par for the course if you’re a company looking to dominate the writing and publishing industry, and I openly confess to buying most of my books through Amazon (even though I do love to browse a real bookstore). But I merely mean to highlight these points to suggest yes, I can see Amazon not quite killing off publishers in the next few years, but certainly marginalising the traditional industry beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Happy Halloween
Classic films aside, if you’re in the mood today for dissecting the nature of horror in fiction and film, you could do worse than look at this massive article in The Psychologist journal:
Psychology can help explain why horror takes the persistent form that it does, but that still leaves the question of why we should want to scare ourselves through fiction in the first place. One suggestion is that, like play, it allows us to rehearse possible threatening scenarios from a position of relative safety. ‘Movie monsters provide us with the opportunity to see and learn strategies of coping with real-life monsters should we run into them, despite all probabilities to the contrary,’ says Fischoff. ‘A sort of covert rehearsal for… who knows what.’ Despite its fantastical elements, Clasen explains that successful horror fiction is usually realistic in its portrayals of human psychology and relationships. ‘That’s where horror matters,’ Clasen says; ‘that’s where horror can teach us something truly valuable.’
Read the rest of ‘The Lure of Horror’. It’s fascinating stuff for any writers out there, horror or otherwise.
I’ve never been a huge fan of writing horror fiction, to be honest, though there is an immense amount of pleasure to be found in creating the odd creepy segment. For the most part, my fascinations have been to make weird, perhaps horrific or otherwise unsettling things, seem quotidian, which is maybe why I enjoyed films such as Ghostbusters.
SF Signal Mind Meld
I’ve contributed to the latest SF Signal Mind Meld, on interesting societies in SF.
Michael G. Coney is an often-forgotten SF author when we talk of the Greats. He wrote a very effective and often trippy brew of sociological SF, and did so in an immensely readable manner. His novel, Mirror Image (1972) was a great example of showing us for what we were. Though the alien society in question in this novel were “amorph’s” (changelings that transformed into whatever we desired), it was the reflection of our own human desires – in fact, the amorphs themselves believed they were human, too. A neat and difficult trick for Coney to pull off, but the end result is a cracking novel.
Read the rest, as well as what everyone else has to say.
Worldbuilding with objects
From the BBC website – A History of the World.
The coin raises the issue of how much contact the Corieltavi tribe (the local British group living around Hallaton in the Late Iron Age) had with the Roman world and how early this occurred. This coin would have been over 200 years old when it was buried in the mid 1st century AD, around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43. Did the coin arrive as part of a diplomatic gift from the Romans in the hope of easing their passage into Leicestershire? Or did the coin gradually make its way to Hallaton from the continent via trade with other Iron Age tribes? The fact that the coin was found in a ritual deposit made around AD 43 also perhaps indicates the tensions felt by local groups caused by Roman interference.
It’s an interesting project, to look at history through objects. It’s also a useful way for fantasy writers to view their own worlds. The Denarius coin was not some explicit magical item. People carried them. People paid for things with them. They went on journeys in pockets or purses. But when the coins were found out of their usual context, they threw up so many interesting questions.
And what a great plot driver: What’s object X doing in location Y? How the hell did it get there and who was involved in that transportation?
Think about all the stories that instantly spring up from that initial question. That’s one of the reasons I’m becoming increasingly interested in history recently – especially classical history, and especially when viewed from a writer’s perspective.
Inanimate objects – and I do want to stress I’m not talking about magical trinkets, but more mundane ones – say much more than you might think. Their appearance can have profound effects in creating a realistic world (if indeed that is the aim of worldbuilding or geofiction in the first place). Their presence in your fiction can give your creations culture. How were these things used? What was the function? What did it say about certain civilisations?
And when you look at many more objects from history, you realise that ancient cultures were more sophisticated than we like to believe. I’ve spoken before about the backward-looking aesthetics of fantasy fiction: a focus on objects, then, strikes me as a great way to add complexity to your aesthetics.
When we’re dead and buried, of course we’ll have our writings and so on for people to pick apart, but surely it’s the objects we leave behind that will help give definition our current culture, be it an iPhone or a plug socket. Even if future generations can’t quite work out how they were used, unanswered questions still show how much depth the real-world possessed.
Such rules could easily apply to your own world, too.
Seattle vigilante in action
Shortly after, our hero was arrested by police for using pepper-spray.
The footage goes on to show Jones breaking up the group. Then a woman screams at him, hitting him with her high-heel shoes. Jones appears to be holding his pepper spray canister.
Those Hollywood films just don’t tell it how it really is for a superhero on the streets…
The Kitschies
I’m all for things that are good for the genre. I reckon the Kitchies – a serious new award with cash prize-money (£750 for the overall winner) and a sponsorship deal from a large drinks company – is exactly what the genre needs.
The Kraken Rum presents the Kitschies, an annual award for those books which best elevate the tone of geek culture.
The Kitschies celebrate the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works – the books that do the science fiction and fantasy community proud. Winners receive a cash prize in addition to one of our lovingly hand-crafted Tentacle trophies and a bottle of The Kraken’s fine black liquid.
What’s not to like? It’s a juried award featuring the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Lauren Beukes, and the team from genre website Pornokitsch, which has a focus on quality and an appreciation for all things geek. It’s that combination which makes me think that genre fans should really be paying attention to this, because it’s the best of both worlds.
Well, that and Kraken Rum. Read more about it here.
The Cult Of SF
A couple of interesting debates going on across the blogosphere about the value of science fiction to science. First at Damien Walter’s blog, who challenges us to discuss.
SF doesn’t just show us possible futures, it trains us to anticipate new technology, model how it will impact our lives and exploit that insight.
Second at Cheryl Morgan’s blog:
The Chinese had got the idea that they needed innovation as well as manufacturing expertise, and they had noticed that young engineers in places like Silicon Valley were all science fiction readers. Consequently they decided that SF needed to be encouraged.
But I want to pick out a particularly interesting example in Cheryl’s blog regarding Climate Change:
While I was tweeting about the panel a link came through for this Guardian article about British scientists creating an “artificial volcano” to test out ideas for combating climate change. I showed it to Rachel afterwards, and she was all over it, but I can just imagine what a committed environmentalist like Mark Charan Newton would make of the idea.
I’ll get to that bit!
Not that either Damien or Cheryl were talking about this subject specifically, as I think they both make many agreeable points about the subject.
But it certainly got me thinking about the way SF is discussed, and what I like to call the Cult of SF – that is, the faith in dreaming up Big Ideas. I can understand the need to stress the importance of Big Ideas. It’s what the genre is about, no? But in some cases – such as climate change, as mentioned in the post – this is where your future dreaming will get the world in trouble. A reliance on such visions in this particular example is a terrible thing. To paraphrase what I said in the comments:
There’s so little time to hold back anthropogenic climate change (assuming you accept the unequivocal science in the first place). Leave it too long, and it will be too late to bring back CO2 concentrations to the necessary levels, causing a huge variety of issues that I’ve gone on about many times before. Dreaming up science fiction, Big Ideas, will not address the actual problems of dumping huge amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere in the first place. Moreover, this SF is diverting attention, political and financial resources away from urgent action. What this also does is play right into the hands of corporate lobbyists who will use it as an argument to delay such urgent action even further, usually to the benefit of [insert polluting organisation here].
Blind faith in science as a solution to our ills, or as some remarkable future dreamscape, can be a dangerous thing. Also, it’s not as though our wonderful Big Ideas don’t come at a cost, such as the monopolising of the food chain. The application of science through reckless corporatism, or by not recognising the practicalities of the real world in the first place, can be devastating. I should also say that what I’ve said above is no more anti-science than being against chemical weapons is anti-chemistry, and nor does it suggest we should put a limit on our ability to imagine. Science fiction is again a wonderful thing; but if we bring it into our culture, I just don’t think we should treat it like a cult of wonder.
The best science fiction, for me, actually realises this; it has a healthy scepticism for the cult of wonder. I guess that is why, for me, M. John Harrison’s or J.G. Ballard’s bleak future visions are among the best SF stories out there. (I especially like the way MJH analysis’s the commercial exploitation of science.) It recognises the corrupting influence of humans.
Christopher Priest – The Islanders
Christopher Priest is an illusionist. If you have read some of his previous novels, you will know to expect to have the rug pulled from under your feet. You will know that the people you see on the page aren’t who you expect them to be or, if they are, they will be more slippery than Michael Gove’s bottom lip.
Entering the Dream Archipelago, Priest’s heady collection of microcosms and forgotten places, was a welcome treat for a fan. And for fans, there are Easter eggs galore: take the presence of writer, Moylita Kaine, whose first manifestation in The Islanders comes as a writer of fan letters to another novelist. We read about her first efforts to become a writer, and that she has finally written a novel, called The Affirmation.
The Affirmation? I thought to myself. Priest wrote a novel called The Affirmation, of course, but I did a little digging. I recalled a short story, ‘The Negation’ (1978) which was first included in a rare collection called The Infinite Summer, and then later the Dream Archipelago book. ‘The Negation’ featured Moylita Kaine as an established novelist. In The Islanders, she crops up again several times, and also (I think) the character with whom she interacted in ‘The Negation’, a minor finale playing out decades later. These connections between books and time will please many of those who have read a lot of Priest’s output: they’re not explicit, they’re elegant inclusions, all part of Priest’s dreamscape.
But back to The Islanders.
There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago. At least, there are no reliable ones, or comprehensive ones, or even whole ones.
Chaster Kammeston, a novelist who will make an appearance later in the novel, explains this in his introduction. The book is presented as non-fiction, a strange collection of tales or accounts, letters, confessions and so on, from the Islanders of the Dream Archipelago. Nothing is certain, as the reader is plunged into mock-travel guide accounts of the many (and there are indeed many) islands that make up the Archipelago. Mixing the island names and patois, the reader is given time to absorb Priest’s fragile reality.
It seems an odd way to go about presenting a novel – if indeed by now it seems a novel – when suddenly the plot appears in an unconventional, non-fiction manner. Characters are reappearing in others’ accounts. Events begin to match up, overlap, contradict each other. Subtleties become extremely important: or, if you’re a Priest fan, possible further deceptions. The reading experience is extraordinary. It’s like a magic eye puzzle: the closer you are to the text, the less you might see. You must be vaguely passive, absorbing the shapes within, to see anything of note (and even then you might be deceived), and yet remain at all times alert. Adam Roberts, in his splendid review, discusses the phrase ‘Ergodic literature’ with reference to reading the novel.
The central plot? That depends on both what you mean by ‘central’ and ‘plot’. Certainly some of the key narratives include: a murder of Commis, a professional mime artist, and those who were involved in and around the theatre at the time, their stories before and thereafter; a radical social thinker, Caurer, and her relationship with literary sensation Chaster Kammeston, his reputation and his death (note: he wrote the introduction to the novel); add to that a famous debauched painter, Dryd Bathurst, a creative tunnelling artist, those who seek to map islands with drones, those interested in the spurious trial of the man executed for supposedly murdering Commis; and keep in mind that all of these and many more micro-narratives connect or glance off each other in all sorts of subtle ways. Ultimately you begin to wonder what the plots actually are, if indeed there are any, or if it is all a vast, blissful game in a setting comprised of multiple cultures, topographies, economies and currencies.
I should also stress some of the beauty here. Priest has always written in a minimalist, deliberately mannered and very English style, which serves his fiction perfectly, because it does not get in the way of the underground complexities. Often, some of the above narratives are heartbreaking, mesmerising, or achingly tender in places. This is certainly his most refined prose.
Ultimately, it is a remarkable book that seems to be a logical continuation, even summation, of all of Priest’s themes to date. What’s more, all of this literary playfulness does not detract from the fact that it is a wonderful, entertaining novel.
It has been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a reading experience this much.