Best Horror on best list

Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year Volume One has made it on to the Best of 2009 list over at fear.net - check out my website for the lowdown on my story Girl in Pieces, which is featured in this great anthology.

Avatar and Anathem

Within two weeks I've been transported to two entirely different worlds, neither of which I've wanted to leave. So I guess I'll have to just shuttle between the two.

It's a long time since I've been as swept away by a book as I was by Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I'm a fan of Mr Stephenson, so was hoping for big things – also wondering if he could top the stupendous Cryptonomicon and Baroque Trilogy. Oddly, despite its massive size and scope, Anathem feels less sprawling than those earlier works, largely because Stephenson ditches the multi-POV approach and tells the story entirely from the viewpoint of Raz, an avout in a concent on the world of Arbre (no I'm not going to explain any of that). The story starts slow, but is never less than fascinating, and steadily builds up an astonishing head of steam. There's enough discussion of matters both quantum and philosophical to melt your brain several times over, all presented by engaging characters in a fully realised and utterly unique world. And an extended orbital climax that's as dramatic and witty and outrageously imagined as anything you could wish to read.

It's also a long time since I've been as swept away by a movie as I was by James Cameron's Avatar, I'm a fan, blah blah ... Well, Mr Cameron's done me proud and created a truly monumental film here. The story grabbed me from the get-go, and all the leads deliver fabulous performances, whether in their human or Navi form. Am I deliberately leading on these things and ignoring the eye candy? You bet, because the eye candy is what the movie's being sold on, but without a story ... well, you know the rest. As for the visuals ... Cameron's taken Barsoom and Pern and Dune and the Amazon rainforest, put them in a blender and come up with something that's beautiful and spectacular and utterly convincing, in a way I've never seen before. Utterly convincing, and seductive, and alien and just plain real. And that's coming from a long-time SF movie geek. My only carp is that here and there the pace could be a little tighter, but I can forgive Cameron because he does what Lucas failed to do in his prequel trilogy – he takes the time to immerse you in his imagined world, rather than rattling through it in fear you may get bored. Bored I wasn't. When I finally stowed my 3D glasses and left the cinema, I felt like Jake Sully waking up back in his human body – I just wanted to go back to Pandora.

"Being original" is the Holy Grail for writers of speculative fiction. Neal Stephenson achieves it, I think. James Cameron's working in a different, more conservative medium, with a lot more money at stake. So Avatar is derivative, where Anathem feels more wholly new. But Stephenson acknowledges his sources, just as Cameron does – check out his website for this generous list of background material he used while writing Anathem. And Cameron cites Burroughs et al as the inspiration for Avatar. Both, however, are skilled enough to stand on the shoulders of giants and see something nobody's ever seen before – and open up the view for the rest of us to boot.

What made me enjoy Anathem and Avatar so much was the sure knowledge that Neal and James (I think we're on first name terms now, guys) created their stories just for me. They know what I like. They know how to tease. They know how to send a shiver down my spine and prompt me to say, "Oh you clever, clever bastard" when they throw in an unexpected twist, or take the entire narrative up a gear, or show me something that simply takes my breath away. They keep tricks up their sleeves. They know they're going to leave me both filled-up and sad when the last page turns and the credits roll.

So, right after Christmas, I'm booking my tickets. An excursion to Arbre first, followed by a sightseeing trip of Pandora. Because both these places are real, you see. It's the only explanation. The only possible way Neal Stephenson can have written Anathem is by slipping sidways through Hemn Space into a parallel narrative (I'm not explaining that either). Likewise, James Cameron has clearly travelled to a breathtaking world inhabited by giant blue aliens you just want to hang out with. They've seen other worlds, and been kind enough to share their experiences. So it's our duty to follow in their footsteps. What are you waiting for?

Snow and Crouch End

Two things to report today. First, it's snowing in Nottingham. Second, I too used to live in Crouch End.

New interview

I was recently interviewed by creative-writing-help.com – check out the link for more about how I started out writing, and how I go about doing what I do.

Blowing own trumpet in silence

I wish I could share with you some nice reviews of a book I wrote earlier this year, but there are a couple of stumbling blocks. First, it was a ghosting project, so I remain resolutely anonymous about the whole thing. Second, first publication was in a language other than English, so I'm forced to run the reviews through a translator before I can get to grips with them. You'll just have to to believe me when I say the star ratings were pretty healthy and the readers seemed to be hungry for more. Which is good because there are two more in the pipeline!

Writing, or how to make balloon animals

A productive week so far: 8,000 words laid down for the new novel I talked about in this post. I'm working from a pretty tight outline, but even so it's a buzz to be writing the real words. However good it may be, an outline's like a limp balloon. It's not something you'd ever want to take to a party. Writing the real words is the equivalent of pumping the thing up. Then maybe pumping up another one and tying the two together. And then maybe attaching some more. Before you know it, you've made a giraffe. With luck, it's not just full of hot air ...

Think I'll stop now before I flog that particular analogy to death.

The 8,001st word is Abalone.

RIP Robert Holdstock

David Langford reports that fantasy author Robert Holdstock has passed away at the age of 61. A sad loss indeed - he was one of the greats.

It's all a plot

I'm plotting three novels at once and it's melting my brain. In a good way, of course. The best way really, because in some ways plotting is the most exciting part about writing fiction. At this stage of the game, anything goes.

To explain, I'm between books in the ongoing ghost-writing project that's taken up most of my year so far (and will continue to occupy me for the first few months of 2010). So I'm taking the opportunity to work up a proposal for a new series of fantasy novels I've been planning for a while. Three books to begin with - as for what happens after that, well, it depends whether I get a publisher to bite or not.

Yes, that means I'm plotting books for which I don't yet have a deal. Trust me, that happens all the time. Which is where the excitement and the brain-melting comes in. Because, much as I'm conscious of market trends and projected page counts and all the conflicting demands of a publishing industry that's feeling the pinch, there's nothing more thrilling than planning your next book. So I'm plotting. And plotting. And plotting.

These days I work mostly in a notebook. Sometimes I draw mind-maps and flow-charts but with this project, for some reason, it all wants to come out in words. A lot of the notes I make are conversations with myself, peppered with frustrated outbursts when I can't get things to hang together. I plot anywhere: on the sofa, in coffee shops, on public transport. I suspect, however, that the real work's going on in the back of my mind when I'm doing other things. Either that or at three in the morning when my brain just won't let an idea go.

You have to be careful though. Plotting's all very well, but plot's not everything. If you read a book that's entirely plot-driven, you know it. The characters do things not because they come naturally but because the plot demands it. They act, well, out of character. Lots of plot often means lots of coincidences. Trails lead neatly to resolutions. Story arcs curve like rainbows towards conveniently placed pots of gold. Everything fits just a little too neatly.

So even when you're plotting you have to keep it messy. Or at least leave yourself room to make a decent mess when you come to write the damn thing. You still have to look at the action through the eyes of your characters, make sure they're properly motivated. It has to feel right, which doesn't necessarily mean it all has to add up.

And the end result of all this? Well, I'll have a page of background on the series as a whole, plus a page of synopsis for each of the three novels. I'll have a character list for the first book, and a detailed chapter breakdown that runs to maybe eight thousand words. Once I'm happy with all that, I'll write the first five or six chapters of the first book. Then I'll get some feedback from my agent. Then I'll know if I'm on the right track.

Excuse me now. I've broken off the plotting to have lunch and write this blog entry. But I reckon one of my villains isn't being nearly villainous enough, and I've just realised there's a cracking revenge story to be told in the middle of book three. The plot thickens.

Dino-blog

There's a bunch of great artist blogs out there. One of my favourites is this one by James Gurney, creator of the Dinotopia books.

Dig the zero-g pen ...

... in 2001: A Space Odyssey. To make Dr Heywood Floyd's pen float across the shuttle's interior, Kubrick's team stuck it on a piece of glass mounted on a rotating rig. The camera shoots straight through the glass and bingo - all you see is the pen. Of all the still-stunning effects in this SF classic, the zero-g pen's the one that really makes me smile.

The author trail

It's like a nature trail, only better. You know how it works; you read a book by an author you never read before, get hooked and follow their trail forever after. It's a kind of literary stalking. We've all done it. There's no shame.

The author trail works in two distinct ways. First there's the backlist trail. This is where you discover a book, only to find the author's written a ton of stuff you never read before. Such trails can result in exhaustion, particularly when the list is long. I first experienced this when I discovered Isaac Asimov at some remote and tender age. Foundation led me to, well, the other Foundation books, and then to I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots and Earth is Room Enough and The End of Eternity and ... well, you get the picture. The same with Larry Niven. Ringworld begat Protector and thence to World of Ptavvs ... these lists can get biblical, can't they?

The second kind of trail is when you discover an author with their very first book. This happened to me with Pratchett's The Colour of Magic and Iain M Banks's Consider Phlebas and a host of others. This kind of trail is a game of patience, as you wait for the next delivery from your new favourite author.

There is, of course, a hybrid third kind of author trail. It's a combination of the first two. Here you discover someone with a backlist but who's also still writing. You devour the oldies and set about waiting for the newies. For me this is probably the biggest list of all. A few years ago I discovered Neal Stephenson through Cryptonomicon, read his earlier works and am now eagerly awaiting the moment I get far enough down my to-read pile to immerse myself in Anathem.

And it never ends. Stephen King's new novel Under the Dome is out today and I'm only just catching my breath from finishing Robert Holdstock's Avilion. And then there's a whole heap of talented new writers who simply have to be sampled. Check out the publishing schedule of outfits like Angry Robot Books if you don't believe me.

Some of you may be wondering where my own trail's headed. As I've mentioned here before, I'm currently tied up with a bunch of ghost-writing projects. They'll take me through into next spring. All good work but it means my own output drops accordingly. Like most writers, I do have unpublished novels in manuscript form, plus other irons in the fire in the form of proposals for novels I haven't yet written. And I'll be working on a new project over the next few weeks – something I'm really excited about but don't want to talk about just yet. But it's tough out there. So right now I'm doing what I do best: concentrating on the words and letting the deals come when they will. Following the trail, if you like. Like they say, it's all in the journey.

Green man reviews best horror

There's another great review for The Best Horror of the Year: Volume One, edited by Ellen Datlow, this time over at The Green Man Review. All the stories in the anthology get a mention. Here's mine:

"Graham Edwards's "Girl in Pieces" is a SF-myth-noir mash-up about a P.I. investigating the murder of a young woman after a golem claims he was framed for the murder. This is a delightfully witty and funny story and provides a much-welcome sense of B movie humor to the collection."

For more info on the story at me website, click here.

Yes, Avatar again

It's my duty to report that the new Avatar trailer is AWESOME.

Ghostly delivery

Yay - I've just delivered the second draft MS for the fantasy novel I've been ghost-writing for the past few months. Don't bother asking me what it's about or who it's for – what kind of ghost would I blabbed about stuff like that?

What struck me about this particular edit was how close I was able to get to the words. "What's he talking about?" I hear you ask. "He's a writer, isn't he? It's all words, isn't it?"

Well, yes. But on this occasion the structure and pacing of the novel were pretty much there after the first draft. That left me free on the second draft to roll up my sleeves, get right into the text and massage it to get the most out of every scene, without worrying too much about how those scenes fitted together. Good prose is all about finding exactly the right word, every step along the way. So that's what I've been doing.

Mind you, with around 80,000 words to consider, chances are I haven't nailed them all. As a famous writer once said (and most writers I know agree), you set out on every project wanting to write the best thing you ever wrote ... and end up just wanting to get the damn thing finished.

And finished it is, which leaves me free to tinker with a personal project before the outline for the third and final book of this ghostly trilogy arrives in my inbox. Who knows, maybe that one will be the best thing I ever wrote. When the damn thing's finished, I'll let you know.

Talisman and Dome

My appreciation of Stephen King started with the 1979 TV version of Salem's Lot, which had us all talking in the school playground about how we hadn't slept a wink after watching David Soul go up against Mr Barlow. After that initiation, my first reading experience wasn't that great. As a teenager I borrowed Pet Sematary from a friend and thought it was all a bit overblown up to the point where the resurrected kid gets hold of the scalpel. Then, at the age of eighteen, I read The Talisman ...

I read The Talisman at lightspeed, consuming the entire second half in a single sitting one wet Sunday afternoon. Jack Sawyer's adventures just blew me away. Years later I loved the sequel Black House nearly as much, for entirely different reasons. I'm not here to review these books, only to tell you to read them, and to say how great the new comic adaptation of The Talisman looks. (I have a particular interest in this as it's drawn by Tony Shasteen, who produced a couple of awesome illustrations for two short stories of mine.)

Since then I've visited Castle Rock and Derry on a regular basis. I've trekked through Mid-World with Roland and his buddies. I'm a true fan. When Mr King writes his introductions dedicated to his Constant Reader, I know he's talking to me. So am I excited about his new novel Under the Dome being published next month? You bet your boots!

Best Horror reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly have posted an excellent starred review of Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year 1:

"After 22 years of pulling the horror content for the now-discontinued Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series, Datlow (Lovecraft Unbound) goes solo with this stellar start to a new “best of” annual. As in the past, her picks confirm that “horror” is a storytelling approach with endlessly inventive possibilities. In E. Michael Lewis's “Cargo,” a haunting Twilight Zone–type tale, an airplane picks up something otherworldly as part of its latest transport. Euan Harvey's creepy “Harry and the Monkey” turns an urban legend into reality. R.B. Russell's “Loup-garou” is a highly original shape-shifter story with a subtle psychological twist, and Daniel LeMoal's “Beach Head” a bracing conte cruel with a Lord of the Flies cast. In addition to the richly varied stories, Datlow provides her usual comprehensive coverage of the year in horror in an introduction that's indispensable reading for horror aficionados."

If you're wondering, of course I have a vested interest, since one of my stories is in there...

Names from the arena

I have a folder on my laptop called The Arena. It's where I put my ideas. Story fragments, outline notes, lists of names or places ... you name it, it's there. Once in The Arena, they scrap it out. Only the strongest survive.

There's something in The Arena right now that wants to be heard. The trouble is, I don't really want to talk about it. The Arena's a hostile place. Sometimes the things in there just wither and die before they even get a chance to take up their weapons. But this particular project already seems to have a life of its own. I've decided to acknowledge that by presenting to you the following list, without preamble or explanation. Just to let it know I'm paying attention.

Abalone
Tiquette
Pyx
Viscero
Ghan
Pyrean

and finally

The Tilt

That's all. Make of it what you will. If the project wins through against the other gladiators in the ring, you'll be the first to know.

Read, edit, sleep, write

It's heads down at Edwards Mansions right now. The usual tight deadline to finish the second draft of the next fantasy novel in the trilogy I'm writing this year (yes, three books in one year and no, I'm not crazy). First task is to work through all the specific comments from the editors ie those relating to particular paragraphs or sentences. That's pretty much done now. Next come the general comments. One of the characters needs to act a little more feisty, for example – that means reading the MS again and rewriting sections accordingly. There are maybe eight or ten general comments of this sort. At the same time I'm doing all my own tinkering. This is the last time I'll get my hands dirty on this book, so I want to make the most of it. When it's all wrapped up there'll be just time for a short nap, followed by a deep breath before plunging into book three!

Best Horror review

The first review of The Best Horror of the Year Volume One, edited by Ellen Datlow and containing my short story Girl in Pieces, has arrived over at Charles Tan's excellent review blog. Click here to read the review.

The future of the book

Check out this article on the Bookseller website, imagining the future of the book. To fuel the speculation, "if:book asked some of its 21st-century experts to use their time machines and then report back from the near and far-flung future." I especially like Bill Thompson's image of books being burned to stoke the fires that run the servers that keep Google going!

Opening the 8mm archive

As threatened, here are a couple of bits of animation from those scratchy old 8mm movies I used to make back in the '80s. Since taking these first tentative steps I've had the joy of producing rather slicker pieces of work using pixels rather than plasticene. But hey, we all start somewhere!

First up is the epic opening shot of Matt Line Tidies Up the Universe, as detailed in my earlier post 8mm planetary approach ...



... followed by the previously mentioned demonic dressing gown from Fever.

Electro-plasmic genre fiction!

In case you were wondering where I got the idea for my latest book, Cosmonoiac, set in a dystopian Antarctica, in which a young techno-obesessed geek stumbles across a dream-inducing drug which spurs him into conflict with a megalomaniacal dictator (all with the help of a leather-clad female with shades and welding gear), culminating in a daring rescue preceding a giant explosion ... check out Wondermark's fabulous Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator!

Dig the demonic dressing gown

One of my earliest adventures in fantasy film-making was the epic Fever, made in collaboration with my long-time buddy Phil Tuppin. It was a four-minute horror movie made with a Standard-8mm clockwork camera and entered for the BBC's Screen Test Young Film-Makers of the Year competition. And, yes, it actually got broadcast in the Highly Commended category, although they censored the second half for fear it would "give younger viewers the heeby-jeebies"!

The key special effect in this epic is a shot of a demonic dressing gown crawling across a boy's bedroom floor, shortly before throttling said boy (who's lying unconscious in bed with a fever) to death. We did it using good old stop-motion animation. Each frame, I extricated myself from behind the camera, picked my way across the room without disturbing any of the artfully-arranged props, moved the gown the requisite inches, then clambered back out of shot ready for Phil to click the shutter. Our rudimentary lighting apparatus meant all this was done under the searing glare of bare 200W bulbs positioned close enough to our faces to act as sunlamps. Back-breaking stuff, but so rewarding to see it all come to life when we got the processed film back from Kodak a fortnight later – yes, this was pre-video and definitely pre-digital.

Most of the other gown shots were puppeteered with garden canes taped into the arms. But that hero shot of the thing crawling across the floor was a real winner. Once again, sadly, I'm posting before sorting out screen grabs from the DVD transfers of these ancient movies (see my previous post 8mm planetary approach), so stand by for a bumper crop of stills soon!

Dig the forced perspective ...

... in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. How can you not be charmed by the simple trick of putting actors at different distances from the camera in order to make one look bigger than the other? By combining this age-old technique with artful set and prop design and cunning camera moves, Jackson and his crew overcame what could have been a major stumbling block by keeping everything in-camera and avoiding (mostly) tricky post-production effects.

Samurai fantasies

I just watched the DVD of Ran, Akira Kurosawa's epic reimagining of King Lear. What's that got to do with genre fiction, I hear you cry? Well, it occured to me (between marvelling at Kurosawa's crystal-clear storytelling, epic staging, beautifully defined characters and jaw-dropping art direction and cinematography) that for the average western audience, the Orient is pretty close to being an fantasy environment. No coincidence, then, that so many western science fiction and fantasy movies have plundered Asian culture for their production design. You can see Samurai motifs in Lucas's stormtrooper costumes, for instance, and even the spacesuits worn by the crew of the Nostromo in Alien. And Joss Whedon's American/Chinese cultural mash-up lends his Firefly universe just the right touch of otherworldly charm.

Watching Ran, I found myself enjoying it on the same level I might enjoy a good fantasy story. The parallels are many: it's set in a simplified feudal society of warlords, where family and honour are top of the agenda. Archetypal characters struggle against the whims of fate in a stylised world of castles and hostile landscapes. There are big battles between huge armies waving colour-coded banners to denote their allegiance. On top of that, because I'm a simple boy from Somerset, medieval Japan looks simultaneously foreign and familiar, and as seductive as all hell.

Reading and standing still

In a few days I'll be getting back the manuscript for the latest ghosting project. A couple of weeks of rewrites and edits and that'll be another book put to bed. I counted up the other day and that brings my total output to twelve novels (including two unpublished) with the thirteenth due for delivery in February.

During the lull I know I should be working on any number of other things, like the proposals for the steampunk and horror novels, the zombie short story I need to finish and the urban fantasy I need to start ... Instead I've got my head firmly inserted in other people's books, namely Stephen Baxter's Flood, which I've just finished. Highly recommended this one – smart, accurate prose, an engaging set of characters driven by the narrative to explore all corners of a drowning world, devastatingly detailed accounts of one flooding scenario after another. Roland Emmerich's new film 2012 promises to be an entertaing slice of goofy Hollywood hokum – Baxter delivers the real deal.

Having put Baxter down I'm on to Alastair Reynolds's The Prefect. It's a while since I've read a good space opera so looking forward to this one. Although that reminds me about the 60,000 words of my own space opera I've got tucked away on a laptop hard drive. It's the first half of a novel called "Unsuitable Worlds" and it was going pretty well until the story flaked out on me. But there's something good in there – time to dust it off perhaps. So there's another thing to add to the list ...

Short and undead

For another of my occasional pieces of flash fiction, check out my latest zombie blink-and-you-miss-it story at Six Word Stories.

Fantasycon this weekend

I can't believe it's nearly time for the British Fantasy Society's annual Fantasycon. It's in Nottingham again this year, at the Britannia Hotel. It runs from 18–20 September – check out their website here for all the details. If you're around on the Saturday you stand a good chance of running into me. Hell, if you wave a book in my face I'll even sign it for you. See you there!

Money or love?

Most writers aren't rich. Most writers struggle through with day jobs and spend their nights doing what they love in the hope it might buy a can or two of soup. Not even reputation can guarantee a publishing deal – as in Hollywood, you're only as good as your last project. And economic downturns hit writers too. If you doubt me, check out this article on The Bookseller website.

Am I sounding gloomy? I don't mean to. Take note of what I just said. Writers spend their nights doing what they love. The words just turn up, you see. What are you going to do – close the door on them?

District 9

I've read reviews of District 9 that praise its edgy first half and complain that it all goes a bit Hollywood towards the end. Well, I think they're missing the point. I saw this movie last night and didn't once take my eyes off the screen, or my attention off the tale. It's precisely because the first few reels are so fresh and pacy and challenging that director Neill Blomkamp earns the right to crank up the action as the film progresses. The documentary edginess never goes away but Blomkamp's not scared to please the crowd too. There's the odd missed beat – most notably when the mismatched human and alien buddies escape a little too abruptly from a high-security research centre – but for the most part this is pitch-perfect.

In the lead role, Sharlto Copley is utterly convincing as the tank-topped, moustachioed pen-pusher whose life takes an unexpected turn while he's evicting a bunch of alien interlopers from a Johannesburg shanty town. Somehow Copley manages to take this unlikeable character from bigoted nerd to unlikely hero ... and a guy you genuinely root for. The aliens (or prawns) are seamlessly integrated into the restless hand-held footage, as is their giant mothership hovering over the city. It all romps along at a fair old lick, never flagging, always demanding your attention, whether through its grimy eye-candy or the affecting and naturalistic performances.

Prawns rule. I'll never look at seafood the same way again.

The Blade Itself

There's lots to like about Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself. Pithy, witty prose for one. And the characters are superbly drawn – smart new takes on the traditional high fantasy archetypes. I loved Logen's contemplative barbarian, world-weary and rather depressed that he just keeps winning all these down-and-dirty battles. Inquisitor Glokta is a joy, with his constant and bitter internal monologue that actually manages to generate sympathy even while he's pulling out the teeth of an unfortunate prisoner.

Even so, I don't think I'll be picking up the sequel.

The trouble is with me. Honest, Joe, it's not you. I've just never been a fan of high fantasy. Maybe I still think of it as "sword and sorcery" – a term that still sends shivers up my spine. The Blade Itself is still a tale of barbarians and battles in a faux-medieval setting. Instead of orcs we have Flatheads and the wizards are called Magi, but it's still all the familiar post-Tolkein ingredients mashed together, albeit with charm and wit and pace.

I picked this book up in the hope of being converted. Sadly, despite Joe Abercrombie's skill as a chef, I have to confess that this is a diet that just doesn't suit me. Much of the problem, I think, boils down to my need to know one critical thing: where the hell is this fantasy world anyway? Tolkein dealt with this question by creating a mythology that could so easily be our own. Middle-Earth is a world that has passed away, symbolised by the elves passing into the West. As John Crowley says, the world was not always as it is now.

Sadly, for me, too much high fantasy relies on the creation of arbitrary worlds. And that's a cop-out. It's one thing to build yourself a wildly imaginative adventure playground for your characters to romp around in, quite another to make that world connect with – and be relevant to – the world we live in ourselves. It's a hard job. The hardest of all, I think.

The Google Debate

There's very little I can add to the ongoing Google Book Settlement Debate, other than to remark that I feel like a very small fish caught up in a tsunami. Do I go with the flow? If so, where will it take me? Or do I try to swim against it? Salmon can climb waterfalls after all.

If you're not clear on what the debate's about, there's plenty out there on the net about it. Just Google "Google Book Settlement" (oh, the irony). In a nutshell, it's about Google scanning out-of-print books in the US and making them available online. Sounds simple, but boy is it a can of worms. It's not even started its run through the US courts and already it's kicked up so much dust it's hard to see what's really going on. Suffice it to say the issues range from questions on how you both interpret and apply of the laws of copyright and intellectual property, all the way through to the future creation of a global digital library.

What do I care? Well, I'm an author with out-of-print material that falls slap into the terms of the settlement. What that means is that, unless I opt out today – and I do mean today because that's the deadline – Google will consider my books up for grabs. So for example they could take my 1995 novel Dragoncharm and turn it into an online edition. Probably with adverts for dog food or lingerie interleaved between the pages. If I opt in (a decision I can at least defer for a while) I get to choose how much of the text is made available, and possibly to benefit from future revenue streams generated by the advertising, or by any other channel.

You might think opting in sounds good. In many ways it does ... sort of. But there are lots of other things going on behind the scenes. The word monopoly springs to mind. And as an author with a vested interest in copyright law – we're talking about one of the ways I put food on the table here, not to mention my fundamental moral rights as a holder of both intellectual property and copyright – I resent the fact I've got to make a choice about doing business with an organisation that I've never sat round a table with. This particular point (and the entire debate actually) is articulated incredibly well by Nick Harkaway on his blog.

So do I opt out today, or leave myself the choice of opting in later? If I do neither, Google will probably scan my work anyway. Can I really swim against the current? As Nick remarks on his blog, "Even now, there are thousands of really good books which are not getting written because everyone is so sodding stressed about it."

Me included!

First draft complete!

Phew – first draft of the fantasy novel finished! Just one week to polish it before initial submission. It feels like rounding the corner towards the final straight!

8mm planetary approach

I've always been into visual effects in the movies. I have whole shelves full of ''Making Of' books and a pile of Cinefex magazines that may soon collapse under its own gravity. What better place to recall some of my own humble efforts at emulating the FX masters than this blog?

I made my first SF spectacular as a teenager – along with my good friends Phil and Andy. Called Matt Line Tidies Up The Universe, it was filmed using the miracle of plasticene animation in glorious Super-8mm. The opening shot of Matt Line shows our hero's spaceship (constructed by yours truly out of left-over Airfix kit parts) approaching the planet on which the beautiful Princess Arriflex is being held prisoner by the Evil Lord Multiplane.

In true Cinefex style, I'll tell you how the shot was achieved. We waited until after dark to get a true blackout, then hung the ship on black cotton out in Phil's back yard. We lit it with a single 200W bulb and shot it in the top half of the frame with a slow, steady zoom out. We then (a terrifying process this) took the film cassette out of the camera and wound it back using a temperamental cranking device. Next step was to point the camera at a previously-prepared photo of the Earth from an astronomy book, only we put a red gel over the lens to make it look all alien and, well, red. By positioning the planet in the bottom half of the shot, we made sure it didn't overlap with the ship.

So there you go. A simple double exposure. Stationary planet, judicious use of zoom to give the ship the illusion of movement. Bingo!

I don't visit YouTube much but when I do I'm amazed at the technical skill of some of the amateur film-makers out there. However, nostalgia dictates that I should call the old 8mm generation to arms and celebrate the good old days. Don't get me wrong, I've done my share of animation using CGI software and non-linear editing. I love the new ways. The joke is that half the rigs I've built in 3DSMax are virtual replicas of the kind of string-and-sealing-wax affairs we used to build in the old days.

More 8mm FX memories to come include the Demonic Dressing Gown, Tyrell Corp Homage and What Bleach Does To Kodachrome. If you're lucky, I'll dig out some stills!

Sharp TV SF

I finally watched Battlestar Galactica Razor last night. Just got Season 4 to go now. Yes, I know I'm hopelessly behind - get over it. It was retro-cool to see the old-style Cylons and Raiders brought out of mothballs in Razor. Greating casting of the young Bill Adama too. What I enjoyed most was the full-frontal tackling of the 'you have to make tough decisions in wartime' theme. Sharp stuff.

Writing like a loom

Yes loom, not loon (although the second also applies). Two weeks now until I'm due to submit a manuscript for the middle book of a fantasy trilogy. This particular contract (a kind of ghost-writing gig for a book packager) puts me on a tight schedule, which means I should finish the first draft at the end of August, leaving me a bare week to edit before submission. A week's not long – writing is rewriting, after all. I will have a chance to tinker further after the packagers have made their editorial comments, but it's tight. Which means I have to make sure the first draft comes out as fully formed as possible. Like carpet coming off a loom.

Masquerade remembered

For all of you who, like me, once tried to fathom the secrets of a book called Masquerade by Kit Williams, check out this story on the Guardian website. Masquerade contained elaborate picture puzzles with a trail of clues leading to buried treasure. Apparently, Kit's finally been reunited with the golden hare that captured the world's imagination thirty years ago.

For trivia fans, a few years ago I had the pleasure of working with an extraordinarily talented artist called Steve Pearce, who was the winner of Kit's second book-based competition. This time the challenge was not only to find out what the title of the book was (the cover had a blank space where the title should have been), but to represent it in as creative a way as possible. Steve built a beautiful mechanical contraption to do just that and walked away with the prize. There's a picture of it here.

Yes, I'm blogging about Avatar

Since everyone else is talking about James Cameron's forthcoming film, I don't see why I shouldn't. Along with the rest of the wired world, I watched the HD teaser trailer for Avatar yesterday. Judging by this morning's reports, it's enjoyed a mixed reception. Astonishing how a simple movie trailer can generate so much heated debate. Time to remember John Brosnan's old Starburst column and tell ourselves, 'It's only a movie.'

But it isn't, is it? It's a Cameron movie. It's a Cameron science-fiction movie. Which does make it rather special. I'll nail up my colours right away and tell you I'm a huge Cameron fan. It was the window display in Tower Records that started it.

Picture the scene. I'm a scruffy art student schlepping through London's West End. My favourite film is Ridley Scott's Alien. I know someone's made a sequel, and Scott's not involved. The guy who's made it has got something to do with Rambo. The new movie's all about big guns and explosions. No way am I going to see it. As I pass the front of Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus, I stop in my tracks. There's a big model of a spaceship in the window. It's called the Sulaco. It looks pretty cool. There's a big gun. Actually, that looks pretty cool too. And there's something else. A gigantic alien ... thing. Sort of like the head of the alien from Scott's movie, but ... pumped up. Really pumped up. It's what my daughter would call mahoosive. I didn't know it at the time, but I'd just got my first view of Cameron's queen.

So I go to see the movie. I'm still sceptical. It kicks off okay, but then the marines start doing their macho thing and I start to worry. Oh dear, I think – here comes Rambo. Then the movie turns. It turns on one shot: the one where Hudson informs everyone they're on an express elevator to hell and the dropship leaves the Sulaco and plummets towards the planet. You know the shot. After that I'm hooked. Not because the movie looks cool – which it does – or Sigourney looks great – which she does – but because the story and characters take over. And that's Cameron's real gift. He delivers spectacle and coolness and eye candy, sure, but first and foremost he's a storyteller. A damn fine one.

So does Avatar cut the mustard? How do I know? I only saw a two-minute tease. But I do think the story sounds clean and engaging and the trailer does what all good trailers should: it makes me hungry to see the movie. And I just love the art direction. Some folk are carping about blue aliens and fairy lights, but what I see is a world that reminds me of all the science fiction book covers I grew up with. Dazzling art by Peter Jones and Chris Foss and Frank Frazetta. I blogged recently about A Princess of Mars, and it strikes me there's something of Edgar Rice Burroughs here. A truly alien world that starts off jolting you with its strangeness and ends up drawing you in. That's something I trust Cameron to do: draw me in.

I see Avatar's got big guns and explosions too. But I've mellowed over the years so, Jim, if you're reading this, leave them in. Just for me.

Proof of horror

Just had the pleasure of checking a PDF proof for The Best Horror of the Year Volume One – well, my own small part of it at least. Great to see my story Girl in Pieces back in print again, and also to see I've been positioned cheek by jowl with the great Joe Lansdale. Publication date for the anthology is October 2009, so get your order in now!

Eddie reboots

Andy may have come up trumps with a lead about the Theatre Clwyd stage version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (see previous post if you want to know what the hell I'm talking about).

Hitchhiker memory bank failure

Years ago I saw a stage production of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What a fun topic to write a nostalgic blog about, thought I yesterday. But, as I tried to pull a few memories together, I realised something shocking: my own interior version of Eddie the Shipboard Computer seems to have had its hard drive all but wiped clean!

So this post has become something of a plea. Who can remember a low-budget UK touring production of HHG2G from somewhere around 1980? Andy Wicks and I saw it at the Poole Arts Centre (now known as The Lighthouse). We've pooled our failing memories of what was actually a great night out and come up with the following:

– Northen accents were apparent in the cast. There's a vague connection in my head with the Hull Truck Theatre Company, but that could be erroneous, especially as there's nothing on their website about them ever staging HHG2G. I also suspect Ken Campbell's name may have appeared somewhere on the programme, but I'm not sure he ever staged the showoutside London's West End, so again that could be a red herring.
– Free 'space sweets' were handed out before the performance.
– During the poetry appreciation scene, Arthur and Ford ran out to sit in the audience (right next to me in fact) to scream at the Vogon verse.
– The show may have started with a Deep Thought scene
– The falling whale scene was visuallised with animation and voiced by a man on a ladder!
– There was lots of smoke.
– It was a whole heap of hoopiness!

It's appalling how little I remember about this show. So I've no choice but to send this request out across the world – if you know what the hell I'm talking about, please comment on this post! In the meantime, I'm off to defragment my frontal lobe in the hope of undeleting a few critical files.

Reconnected, fishing

Ah, the joy of disconnection. I've just spent a week on a boat, completely out of touch with pretty much everything except, well, water. No news, no net (except the fishing kind), no nothing. Plenty of reading matter mind you, including Joe Abercrombie's entertaining The Blade Itself. Now I'm back on this net, catching up with all things speculative and literary, not least the various hooks I've got dangling in the editorial waters, including two novelettes hoping for a bite - fingers crossed on those little babies. Out in the trawling water, my fantasy detective novel String City is in the safe hands of my fabulous agent Dorothy Lumley, and there's an outline for another fantasy novel bobbing around on the water somewhere. Writing, like fishing, is a game of patience. To keep me busy while I'm waiting for the next bite, I'm due to deliver an 80,000 word manuscript in three weeks, so no time for slacking now the holiday's over!

Goodbye Jim Baen's Universe

Another sad day in the short fiction field – Jim Baen's Universe is to close after its April 2010 issue. About the closure, editor Eric Flint says, 'In a nutshell, we were simply never able to get and retain enough subscribers to put us on a sales plateau that would allow us to continue publishing.' It's a real shame to see this great online magazine fold after four years, not least for Eric and Mike and all the other staff. Sorry to hear about it guys.

I was fortunate enough to have a story published in this online staple. It was called Riding the Drop and it's still available to read online for free here, courtesy of Jim Baen's Universe.

Dig the independent shadow ...

... in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (how much attribution do you need in just one title?). Yes, Gary Oldman's got a wacky hairdo but don't you just love the way his shadow's got a life of its own?

Return of the wizards

Let me get this up front – I'm not a big fan of Harry Potter. I read the first book, and enjoyed the Dahl-like ideas of living under the stairs and moving to tiny islands to avoid owl-mail. But it never really gripped me and it remains the only book of the series I've read. I dutifully watched the first four films with my kids, who grew up enchanted by Harry and his pals. But I only really enjoyed the one with the werewolf and grew tired of the bloated attempts to compress entire novels down to screenplay-size.

But I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night and, dang me, I really enjoyed it! I liked the straight-line story unencumbered by too much baggage from previous plots. I liked the teenage sexual politics. I liked the smart camera work. I loved Jim Broadbent to bits. And I find myself keen to find out what happens to these memorable characters in the final story.

At the same time, I've picked up my first Pratchett for a long time. I'm proud to have read Sir Terry from the start, enjoying The Colour of Magic when it was on its first print run and nobody had heard of Discworld. But, having devoured all those early novels, I peaked and my appetite for turtle-based fiction dwindled. Now I'm reading Interesting Times, not a particularly recent one but an apt choice as it reunites Rincewind and Twoflower, who kicked the whole thing off for me.

I always find Discworld books a bit hard-going at the start – the earlier ones at least, the later ones are structured a little differently. I find the choppy scene-changes, well, choppy, and get impatient for the strands to start knitting together. Then, just when I'm feeling at my most frustrated, I realise I'm reading a clever story that's character-driven as much as it is artfully plotted, and that goddammit I really do care deeply about these absurd people on their absurd flat world.

You'll have gathered from some of my previous posts that there's a fair degree of nostalgia running through this blog. I make no apology for that – you'll get the new stuff too, as and when it turns up. Right now I'm just tickled to be seeing wizards again.

Addicted to six

More Edwards microfiction hits the web at Six Word Stories. I could stop if I wanted. Really I could. (Note to self: get on with the damn novel!)

Numinous? You what?

Jo Walton has written a nice piece over at tor.com entitled Fantasy and the Numinous. Go and check it out. She's elaborating on an earlier post, essentially talking about definitions of magic in fantasy fiction. She says, "By 'the numinous' I don’t mean magic as it can be codified in a magic system, I mean the kind of thing that genuinely makes you feel awe." It's a debate close to my heart, the same thing I was talking about in my earlier post Where does the magic live? ... but I think Jo's more articulate than me on the subject!

The weight of the word

I make the occasional visit to local primary schools to talk about creative writing and my experiences in the publishing industry. Halfway through telling the children about my first novel Dragoncharm, I bring out the original typescript and drop it on the table. At 798 pages it makes quite a bang (and raises plenty of nervous giggles). It's a good icebreaker.

When I reveal that the first draft handwritten manuscript was even bigger, they gasp. Of course, my humble offering is nothing compared to some. Check out Neal Stephenson's picture of his Baroque Cycle manuscript here. If you dropped that bad boy it would fall through the floor!

Apart from creating a bit of theatre, dropping the pages sets me up to make a particular observation – namely that seeing your work in print after slaving over a manuscript can be a bit weird. You pick up the book and think, 'This isn't what I wrote – what I wrote weighs the same as a small child and can be reduced to chaos by high winds.'

Of course, when you write – as I do these days – mostly on a laptop, it flips to the opposite extreme. 'What I wrote' is now a scrollable string of virtual words I can carry around on a USB stick so small I have to be sure not wear the trousers with the hole in the pocket. Yes, I print it out (it always reads differently on the page) but the principle holds true: compared to the original, the paperback version feels like something from another planet.

When your work's published online it's a little different. In some ways the text looks much the same as it does on your laptop. On the other hand, I still don't feel too comfortable reading on screen, so I'll most likely print it out anyway!

So when I'm asked, 'Do you read your own work?' the answer is, 'Yes, I do.' Because, however familiar it may be (and however sick of it I may be!), it always looks different in its final form. So reading it gives me a chance to (a) get an idea of my audience will perceive it and (b) read it with a fresh eye. Trust me, that's often no more fresh than a month-old kipper, but it's as close as I'm going to get. The only alternative is to bury the thing for years and only disinter it when it's started to turn green and move about of its own accord.

I do that too.

Now SFSignal is Six

Another birthday: SF Signal is six today. Many happy returns!

Best Horror TOC

Nightshade Books have just announced the complete table of contents for The Best Horror of the Year, Volume One, edited by Ellen Datlow. It's great to have my story Girl in Pieces in such a meaty anthology, and especially to be in such esteemed company. While I'm on the subject, all hail Tony Shasteen who created this awesome illustration for the story's first appearance in Realms of Fantasy.

Here's the TOC:

Cargo — E. Michael Lewis
If Angels Fight — Richard Bowes
The Clay Party — Steve Duffy
Penguins of the Apocalypse — William Browning Spencer
Esmeralda — Glen Hirshberg
The Hodag — Trent Hergenrader
Very Low-Flying Aircraft — Nicholas Royle
When the Gentlemen Go — Margaret Ronald
The Lagerstatte — Laird Barron
Harry and the Monkey — Euan Harvey
Dress Circle — Miranda Siemienowicz
The Rising River — Daniel Kaysen
Sweeney Among the Straight Razors — JoSelle Vanderhooft
Loup-garou — R.B. Russell
Girl in Pieces — Graham Edwards
It Washed Up — Joe R. Lansdale
The Thirteenth Hell — Mike Allen
The Goosle — Margo Lanagan
Beach Head — Daniel LeMoal
The Man From the Peak — Adam Golaski
The Narrows — Simon Bestwick

Forgotten books emerge from slow glass

Just discovered a heap of Bob Shaw books buried in a forgotten corner. Ah, the joyful anticipation of rereading some old favourites!

Bob's concept of slow glass is still one of those ideas from heaven - a dream of an idea that gets right under your skin and just wriggles there. In case you don't know, slow glass simply transmits light at a slower rate than usual. The thicker the glass, the slower the transmission. Bob teases a wealth of material from this apparently simple concept, from streetlights that use 12-hour slow glass to store up sunlight and let it out at night, to a piece of glass through which a murder may be observed ... when the light finally comes through.

Another of his ideas that always tickled me (I think it was in Who Goes Here?) was his FTL drive that involved a teleportation transmitter at the back of the ship and a receiver at the front. The ship teleports itself in a series of jumps, each one exactly the length of its own hull. Like a cosmic inchworm. And since each individual jump is pretty much instantaneous, so's the whole journey. That story was played for laughs but Bob was mostly a serious writer. And without doubt the master of the high concept from left field.

Finding these books again is a bit like watching something come through slow glass. Nice to have them in the light again. Orbitsville here I come!

Happy birthday tor.com

tor.com is one year old today. Head on over there to join the fun (and celebrate moon-landing day to boot!)

Three out of three of six

I'm on a roll over at Six Word Stories! The third of my recent three microfiction efforts made it through the net and on to the site here. This one's the best, in my humble and arguably skewed opinion.

Worldcon Writers Workshop

Via Doug Cohen's blog, I see Gregory Frost is struggling to get word out about the Anticipation Montreal Worldcon Writers Workshops, so do please check out this link. Here's the blurb about the sessions:

"The Writers Workshops at Anticipation are small session workshops for either experienced or beginning writers based on manuscripts submitted in advance. These workshops provide Anticipation members the opportunity to have their manuscripts evaluated by selling writers and industry professionals who enjoy helping them grow as writers. Many of these professionals have taught at residency workshops, such as Clarion, or in creative writing programs."

Dig the monoliths ...

... in the curiously compelling 1957 movie The Monolith Monsters, in which your average American B-movie desert burg is threatened by, well, rocks. That's inexplicably self-replicating rocks from a meteor, naturally. Great miniature work.

Short short

Six more of my words have hit the big time over at Six Word Stories. For narrative pared to the bone, go check out my latest short story here. And I really do mean short.

Joe Lansdale on publishing (and other things)

I just caught up with the Reading and Writing Podcast 008, a great interview with Joe Lansdale. As well as spilling a heap of good stuff about his writing, Joe also talks at some length about the current state of the publishing industry. He's got an interesting argument: that publishers always used to be small family businesses, and it's only since the 70s and 80s that the 'blockbuster mentality' crept in, much as it did in the movie business. The resurgence of small presses is evidence that things are levelling out again. Turbulent times, and bad news for the big boys, but maybe good news for writers like me (and thousads of others) who don't attract big advances and tend to fall under the radar of those aforementioned big boys. There's more, but you're best listening to Joe, who tells it far better than me. Oh, and if you haven't read Joe's work, go out and find yourself some right now!

Made-up people to the rescue

I'm writing book two of a fantasy trilogy to a tight outline and an equally tight deadline. The up side of that is there's no time to mess about, and certainly no time for self-indulgence. I'm also free to enjoy the prose and the story-telling, without worrying too much about plotting, because that's mostly done. The down-side is I run the risk of writing mechanically, just trotting out the text by the numbers. There are ways around this, of course, all of which I'm trying to employ. But the best bit of all is when the characters themselves come to your rescue and start talking in their own voices instead of parroting what the plot requires them to say. Sometimes that happens from the get-go, however with this project it's taken a little while for them to wake up. But, about half an hour ago, that's exactly what they did, and suddenly I feel a whole lot better because from this point on I think the book will pretty much write itself. Thanks guys. You may only be fictional, but I'd trust you with my life any day.

Ishi, Ish and Earth Abides

There are a few books I come back to over and over again. One of these is George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. You've probably read it, but if you haven't I can't implore you enough to find a copy. It's probably the best post-apocalypse story you'll read. In it, Californian Isherwood Williams wakes from a snake-bite-induced delirium to discover a plague has all but erased mankind. Stewart does a grand job of chronicling Ish's journey and ultimate ascension to the role of 'the last American', but what sticks with me are the glorious interludes where he tracks the gradual decay of technology, and its absorption back into the natural world.

If you've been following this blog, you'll know by now I have a thing about names. For some reason, the name 'Ish' has always struck me as hauntingly odd. Well, today I discovered why. In 1911 a man from a stone-age culture walked out of the California hills and became famous as the 'last wild Indian'. His name was Ishi, and he experienced a few years of celebrity at the university in San Francisco. David Pringle has written a great piece about all this, including the connection between Ishi and Earth Abides - you can read it here. There's a Wikipedia article too. They say truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, it's at least as fascinating.

Dig the starfields ...

... in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, the UFOs are great but check out the gorgeously crisp night skies they're flying through, courtesy of the great Doug Trumbull.

Do you want source with that?

On my bookshelf as a young kid I had a book called Bambi by Felix Salten, another called The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith and The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. I suspect my parents bought them for me when the Disney movies came out. However, these were 'real' paperback editions, not movie tie-ins. So, from an early age, I was very conscious of how adaptations play with the source material.

Thanks to their popularity – not to mention the power of the Disney marketing machine – it's the animated features that most people think of when you throw them the title. And that's a shame. Don't get me wrong – I love these movies – but they're just one studio's interpretation of the texts. And for all the rewards movie success may (or may not) bring to an author, it's a pity if it's at the expense of the original work.

Adaptations can lead to some fairly bizarre situations. PKD famously refused to write a novelisation of BladeRunner and no wonder – why novelise a screenplay adaptation of a book you wrote yourself? Just read the damn book! Or take Michael Crichton's novel of the The Lost World, written concurrently with the movie script, which is a sequel to the movie version of Jurassic Park rather than his original novel, and amongst other things has to deal with the tricky problem of resurrecting Ian Malcolm, who dies in Jurassic Park the book but not the film! Confused? Let's not even go into the different iterations of The HItchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy (although the mutability of that particular sequence of stories has a charm all its own, and seems entirely appropriate given the rather unreliable reputation of the Guide as a definitive source of knowledge).

Of course, it's not a given that the original is better than the adaptation. There are plenty of movies that spin literary flax into cinematic gold. But seek them out all the same, if only to see what you've been missing. And ponder, for example, why this scene never made it on to the Disney storyboard:

"(The assassins) tied Pinocchio's hands behind his shoulders and slipped the noose around his neck. Throwing the rope over the high limb of a giant oak tree, they pulled till the poor Marionette hung far up in space. Satisfied with their work, they sat on the grass waiting for Pinocchio to give his last gasp. But after three hours the Marionette's eyes were still open, his mouth still shut and his legs kicked harder than ever ... The rocking made him seasick and the noose, becoming tighter and tighter, choked him. Little by little a film covered his eyes ... He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched out his legs, and hung there, as if he were dead."

Rip it up

Deleting stuff on a word processor is highly unsatisfactory experience. You push a key and it's gone. Where's the passion? Where's the anger? How can electronic deletion deliver the same catharsis as, say, grabbing the ten pages of manuscript you just spent a whole morning sweating over (and which you just reread only to conclude they stink), ripping them to shreds and hurling them into the wastebin? So here's my challenge to programmers: write me some software where, when I hit delete, the whole page disintegrates, or melts, or explodes into flaming shards of atomic chaff. With suitable sound effects, of course.

Make sure there's an undo though. Just in case.

Short and ...

... I'll let you decide if it's sweet. Read my latest microtext at Six Word Stories.

W = 100c – T ...

... where W is word count, T is temperature and c is a constant the value of which I haven't quite worked out yet. My basis for this theory? The fact that yesterday evening, still sweltering in the UK heatwave, I laboured for two hours over maybe five hundred words of manuscript that at best were distinctly average. This morning, I got up bright and early (well, early) and in one hour rewrote most of what I wrote last night and added another five hundred words for good measure. I reckon the temperature difference between the two sessions was a good twelve degrees. QED. I shall now submit my findings to the Nobel Foundation in the hope of receiving the recognition I deserve.

Dig the asteroid field chase ...

...in The Empire Strikes Back. Nuff said.

Fancy handles

Yes, I'm banging on about names again. I make no apology. I like names. Names have power.

Naming things – characters or worlds or, well, just stuff – can be a thorny problem for the writer of speculative fiction. Do I keep it simple or go off the deep end? Do I invent new words and languages or rely on the old ones? Portmanteau words are a popular option – bolting together two or more everyday words to make an shiny new one. That durable SF building material plasteel springs to mind. If you're not sure whether to go for plain or fancy, you can do both, which has the added advantage of adding texture to your worldbuilding. Hence Frank Herbert's planet Arrakis (fancy), also known as Dune (plain), is inhabited by the monstrous Shai-Hulud, AKA sandworm. You get the picture.

Fancy handles can get silly of course. I've encountered too many doorstop-sized fantasies populated with characters who go by names like Zzpan-ga-molzniuk or Jhsyn-hss. I hate that. Tolkein never made that mistake, sticking mostly to names you could actually pronounce, yet which looked exotic on the page. And, like Herbert, he used the many-languages trick to add depth.

So what's my approach? Whatever I say here, I'm sure to contradict it in the next piece of fiction I write. But by and large I favour plain over fancy. So when I created the huge cast of dragons for Dragoncharm and its sequels, I used down-to-earth names like Fortune, Wood, Gossamer and Wraith. Names are like fishhooks – keep them sharp and simple and you reel the reader in.

And there's this fantasy detective I've written about from time to time. He's starred in six short stories (plus a hot-off-the-press but as-yet-unpublished manuscript for a novel called String City) and his name isn't mentioned once. His anonymity started as a writer's conceit in the first story and just continued from there. Writing in the first person lets you perform stunts like that. He does have a name – I just don't know what it is. Maybe one day he'll tell me. Until then, he's the boss.

Like I said, names have power.

Four chapters and counting

As techniques go it's a simple one. A no-brainer, you might say. Which makes it perfect for a disorganised clod like me. I'm talking about word count.

I'm on a fairly tight schedule to deliver an 80,000-word manuscript by the beginning of September. The outline's clearly defined and, since this is a sequel, I'm dealing mostly with continuing characters. So it's tempting to ease back. What's the rush? It'll get done. Maybe I'll take Douglas Adams's advice and, instead of writing, have another bath.

To bring myself in line, I've pasted a series of milestones at the bottom of the manuscript to remind me how many chapters I need to have written by the end of each week. The cut-off point each week is Sunday evening. Yesterday's official milestone was chapter four, which I hit mid-afternoon after finding all kinds of excuses not to work on the book on Saturday (well, Andy Murray was playing, wasn't he?). So I woke up today knowing I was right on schedule.

I told you it was simple. Doesn't make it easy though. It all comes down to the best bit of writing advice I've come across (sorry – I can't attribute this as I've lost the reference):

"The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."

Or, in my case, the sofa. Well, you don't want to make it too hard on yourself, do you?

What's in a name? – Thursday Next

Jasper Fforde's love of the language – not to mention his sense of humour – is nowhere more obvious than in his choice of character names in The Eyre Affair. Thursday Next is a fun monicker for a heroine in a novel whose supporting cast includes Colonel Braxton Hicks and Dr Runcible Spoon. And how can you not chuckle at a dark and devious chap called Jack Schitt?

Dig the daemons ...

... in The Golden Compass. I'm not picking these out because the CGI's good (which for the most part it is) but because they're that rare example of something that not only survives the transition from page to screen, but actually surpasses the original text.

Pullman's central concept in His Dark Materials is that, in Lyra's world, souls exist outside their owners' bodies as companion animals, or daemons. It's beautifully done in the books, but cinematically it's solid gold – the perfect way to see inside your characters' hearts without resorting to voiceover. The movie equivalent of subtext, if you like.

And it works in so many ways. When a character's doing one thing, their daemon might be doing quite another – what a fabulous way to show internal conflict. When someone dies, their daemon disappears in a soundless explosion of light – their soul really has gone to another plane ... or been snuffed out altogether. You even get to have a character soliloquise without it seeming contrived – they just have a conversation with their daemon.

Big, dumb and primitive

I recently re-read Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, having not picked it up since I was a teenager. What struck me – apart from the remarkable clarity of the prose and the clean straight lines of the narrative – was the geometry.

Rama, the alien spacecraft featured in the novel, is an enormous cylinder. Now, there are sound scientific reasons for this (the cylinder's hollow so, when it spins, the centrifugal effect creates artificial gravity on its inner walls). But the cylindrical shape also creates something far more important than mere gravity. It creates an icon.

I have this theory that if Rama was just another spaceship, with the usual bulging engines and industrial twiddly bits, it wouldn't have stuck in my mind nearly so well. It's the simplicity of the cylindrical form that makes it memorable and somehow epic. And it's not just Rama. Think about some of those other big dumb objects floating out there in the literary universe: Niven's Ringworld, Shaw's Orbitsville, Baxter's Sugar Lump. Rings and spheres and cubes. Shapes a geometry professor would call primitives.

This primitive iconography gets into the movies too. Those classic Star Wars designs, for instance: Death Star, Star Destroyer, Millennium Falcon, TIE fighter. Or, if you prefer: sphere, triangle, circle, pair-of-hexagons-on-a-spherical-mount. Star Trek delivered that big Borg cube and the Enterprise is just a bunch of primitive shapes faired neatly together. And what about good old flying saucers?

I'm not saying you have to stick to these basic forms to create a memorable piece of hardware. Serenity looks like she was built from spare parts but I'd just love to take a ride in her. All the same, primitive is good, because of what the word really means: original, or irreducible. Ancient, if you prefer. Primitive shapes stir you in the same way Ice Age rock art or tribal music stir you. Primitives pull back the veils of civilisation and give you a glimpse of something fundamental. Something that's been around a lot longer than we have. Something true.

So do I dig big dumb objects? Absolutely. The bigger and dumber the better. Just so long as they're the right shape.

What's in a name? – Hiro Protagonist

One of the cheekiest names in speculative literature has to be Hiro Protagonist. Neal Stephenson's arguably the only writer who could pull this off – which indeed he did, in his novel Snow Crash. I just wish I'd thought of it first.

Feeding the monster

I once wrote a story called Dead Wolf in a Hat in which I fooled around with some of the standard werewolf conventions. In researching the story, I stumbled on a Bavarian variety called a Boxenwolf, whose ability to shapeshift was controlled by a special belt, and I got to wondering what other accessories or articles of clothing might have a similar effect. I also got to wondering exactly when it was I encountered my first werewolf.

The mundane truth is it was probably watching Scooby Doo, but I reckon the first lycanthrope that really got to me - and still the most memorable of the movie werewolves IMHO - appeared in John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. That transformation scene was just so bone-crunchingly real. The next milestone for me was Wolf in Stephen King's The Talisman (read the book and I guarantee that particular hairy beast will break your heart).

What's always intrigued me about the whole shapeshifter thing is why the wolf has become - in Western culture at least - its primary incarnation. Of course there are Asian weretigers and so on, but let's face it, wolves rule and all the others drool. I've always assumed it goes back to hunter-clan folklore when man and wolf were first united in chasing down prey. Wolf became dog became man's best friend. But a friend with teeth, who was perfectly capable of tearing your throat out if the call of the wild came too loud and strong. Or when the moon was full.

If you believe everything you read on the internet (why wouldn't you?) there are maybe half a billion dogs in the world. And dogs are genetically almost indistinguishable from wolves. There may be one in your home right now. So whenever you open a can of Pedigree Chum, just remember you're feeding the monster. And next time you go to sleep ... consider locking the bedroom door.

Dig the heavenly court ...

... in A Matter of Life and Death. Models, matte paintings and a healthy dose of Powell and Pressburger's quirky English surreality create a quirky vision of a bureaucratic afterlife.

Mars is heaven

I've travelled many times to Mars, courtesy of Bradbury and Dick and Baxter et al, but never to Barsoom. It's a shameful gap in my reading and one I'm now plugging by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars.

I'm about halfway through and it takes me right back to when I was a kid and lapping up Burroughs's Pellucidar novels. It's energetic stuff, and the hero John Carter, in this case is always ready to let fly with his fists - or whatever weapon comes to hand for the sake of saving the beautiful princess-in-peril. Mars - AKA Barsoom - is an unlikely version of the real thing, a planet carpeted in moss and peopled by four-armed green men and more recognisable red ones, as well as all manner of beasties that are neither wee nor timorous.

But the thing that strikes me most as I enjoy the book is the very real sense of being transported to another world. That may seem an obvious thing to say, but think about it a minute. From a 21st century perspective this book is clearly ridiculous. The science is nonsense, the scenarios contrived and the characters mere stereotypes. But ...

As a writer of speculative fiction, I'm constantly trying to devise new ways to, well, speculate. And that can be a tough job when we're all already living in the future. And when all the old fantasy tropes are so darned familiar. Why do you think we now have terms like "slipstream" and "genre-bending" and (still good for a few years) "post-modern"? But reading Burroughs again has reminded me of something it's easy to forget: the simple urge of a reader to escape. Where? Anywhere really. Let's just have some fun here.

And fun is what I'm having, reading A Princess of Mars. I'm not here to critique it, or place it in its historical context, simply to express a reader's pleasure in spending a few hours in an entertaining fantasy that is, above all other things, comfortable. Next week I might be reading something that bends my brain and challenges my philosophies, and that's fine too, but that'll have to wait, because the beautiful Dejah Thoris has got herself in trouble and needs rescuing again. And there's only one man for the job.

What's in a name? – X

The protagonist of Kim Stanley Robinson's sublime Antarctica is called X. It's a nickname actually, but I'm pretty sure his real name's never mentioned. Chapter one puts the book's cards on the table by saying, quite simply: "Call him X."

Names have great power in fiction, and to reduce one's title character to a mere symbol is pretty daring. I'm not sure I'd have the nerve. But it works beautifully, and perfectly represents one the novel's key themes: that there are some environments so alien – even on Earth – that man will always struggle to represent himself there; against Antarctica's uncompromising tableau of ice, rock and sky, he's reduced to just a crude mark on the landscape.

When you think about it, "X" is the perfect everyman name. If you're asking your readers to project themselves into the narrative, what better way than to give them a blank space into which to insert themselves? So why not take it a stage further? How about a literal blank space? Could you read a book where the hero's name is                ?

I believe in ghosts

It looks like much of my output this year will be entirely invisible. At least, I'll be invisible - you'll still be able to read the words. By early 2010 I'll have written close to 200,000 words of fantasy fiction and chances are you won't even know it was me.

Ghost-writing might sound like a thankless job - why slave away if there's no prospect of recognition at the end of it? Well, as most writers know, it ain't the fame it's the gig. And as gigs go, this one's pretty good. I get to spend my time doing what I was built to do ... and get paid for the privilege. I get to work with talented collaborators, so I'm free to enjoy the characters and the language while somebody else sweats over story arcs and pubishing deals. Is all that worth having to keep my lips sealed and assume a false identity? Hell, yes. The public image of an author is usually as much of a fiction as the characters that author creates - ghosting just takes that to its logical conclusion.

So in answer to the question, "What are you working on at the moment?" I'm afraid I have to answer, "None of your business ... but you're gonna love it!"

Dig the tornado ...

... in The Wizard of Oz. All the more amazing when you consider it was a live stage effect, achieved by puppeteering a giant cotton cone covered in Fuller's Earth. No models, no optical, just a dirty great big twister.

Small steps

Why do I like speculative fiction? Am I hard-wired that way? Is there a gene? Was I abducted by aliens as a small child and infused with an urge to read about strangers in strange lands? In short, was it nature or nurture?

I don't recall any incidents with aliens (although if they used mind-altering drugs to adjust my memory I wouldn't, would I?). However, I do have a vivid memory of creeping down the stairs at the age of four and peeping through the bannisters to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing on the late evening news. Even now, whenever I see that ghostly black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong taking his one small step into the Sea of Tranquility, I see it through the eyes of that small boy. Some moments are pivotal in history. I think that one was for me.

So much for science fact. What about science fiction? I'm fairly confident my first experience of it came thanks to Roald Dahl. Yes, I know he's rarely mentioned in the same breath as Clarke and Heinlein and PKD but stick with me on this.

Dahl wrote a very famous book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which practically everyone on the planet has heard of. He followed it up with the rather less famous Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. The story of C&TGGE involves a giant orbiting space hotel, an invasion of agressive aliens called Vermicious Knids and a pair of new drugs that make you respectively older or younger. Over-use of the former makes one of the charactes hundreds of years old and suddenly able to remember the voyage of the Mayflower. Abusing the latter results in someone achieving a negative age. The resulting trip to Minus-land - a dark, disturbing realm full of flesh-eating monsters - was, as far as I recall, terrifying.

Pretty heady stuff for a kids' book? Not really, especially when you consider Dahl's famously fertile imagination. C&TGGE is a great example of big SF ideas being slipped in under the radar. Many of the ideas it plays with have now become so familiar through movies, TV shows and – god help us – adverts, that it's easy to forget their raw power. We're blase to the idea we could go back in time and kill our own grandparents. We've seen so many monsters on telly that we've forgotten how scary they really are. It's like the scene at the end of Joe Dante's The Howling, when Dee Wallace's news anchor character goes public by transforming into a (rather cute) werewolf on live TV. A couple of old geezers watching the programme in a bar remark to each other that "it's amazing what they can do with special effects these days".

So next time you pick up a story about alien invasion or time travel, don't be cynical, or even worldly. Instead, try considering it from the point of view of a four year-old child. I guess I'm talking about good old sense-of-wonder here, but I can't help trotting out my favourite ever SF quote. It's from Philip K Dick and it points out where speculative fiction differs from its mainstream counterpart, and it goes something like:

"(Science fiction) is not just 'What if?'. It's 'MY GOD, WHAT IF?!!'"

Adverbs are the devil's work ...

.. so use them only in case of emergency.

A million words and counting

The US-based Global Language Monitor reckons a new English word is coined every 98 minutes, and that we've just hit the "one million words in the language" mark – although there's some debate about the validity of this claim, neatly summarised on The Guardian's site here.

As a writer of English (that's English English, naturally, US English being in my opinion an entirely foreign language) I say the more the merrier. However, just as we should be encouraged to renovate abandoned city slums before building in the green belt, let's spare a thought for all those poor forgotten words that have slipped out of the vernacular.

For a delightful trip into a lost lexicographical past, you can do worse than visit The Phrontistery's Compendium of Lost Words, with its list of words "that have been entirely absent from the Internet, including all online dictionaries, until now". There you'll find such gorgeous entries as bubulcitate (to act or cry like a cowherd), kexy (dry, brittle or withered) and weequashing (the spearing of fish or eels by torchlight from canoes).

Effects that are special include ...

... the back projection work in Aliens. That means the spectacular dropship crash, of course, but look out for the less obviously showy stuff, like the view through the control centre window as the air processor vents steam.

Inflatable space elevator

Spotted this article on the New Scientist website. It seems an inflatable tower could take us a long way towards orbit, using conventional materials. I can't help thinking you'd need one hell of a puncture repair kit to hand, but it's a fascinating addition to the whole space elevator debate.

There's an annual competition, I think, to promote the development of the kind of super=strong materials you'd need to build to run a cable from low orbit down to an anchoring point on the ground. As I recall, last time round the machinery built to test the materials wasn't strong enough to hold up under the strain ...

Space elevators crop up from time to time in SF, most memorably for me in Arthur C Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise. I remember reading another book published around the same time – The Web Between the Worlds by Charles Sheffield. Out of print now I think. I don't remember much about the story, but I do recall a character who ran a worldwide computer network, and who asserted that the real power in such a network wasn't the computers, or even the data, but the ability to catalogue and search that data. I thought that was a neat observation back in 1980, and wondered if such a catalogue-and-search system would ever appear in my lifetime. Maybe I should Google it ...

Another memorable space elevator is the Mars elevator in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Blue/Green Mars trilogy. It's used as the stage for the spectacular finale to Red Mars. Much easier to build one on Mars, of course, as there's less gravity and there are lots of handy asteroids close by to use as anchors for the space station at the top of the tower. I particular like the way Robinson's tower has a carefully calculated wobble to yank it out of the way of those inconvenient moons.

Pronounced undead

It's Monday and I'm still immersed in zombies. That's not a sentence I plan to use in everyday conversation. If you like zombies, by the way, you should read World War Z by Max Brooks. (I'm English, so as you read this post please be sure to pronounce it 'World War Zed'.)

Science fiction double feature

It's the middle of the eighties, the middle of a winter's afternoon and the middle of one humdinger of a storm. Andy Wicks and I are in the middle of the stalls of the huge Gaumont cinema in Bournemouth. There are maybe six other people in there with us.

We're treating ourselves to a double bill of John Carpenter's The Fog (which we haven't seen before) and Ridley Scott's Alien (which we have). We endure Rank Screen Advertising and a scattering of dismal previews. The Fog begins. The storm's so loud we can hear it over the soundtrack. In the opening campfire scene, a hand snaps shut a dangling pocket watch and makes us jump out of our seats. Outside the storm gets louder. We're hooked. Then, about halfway through the movie, Adrienne Barbeau's face begins to melt. Toxic waste erupts from the middle of the screen and splashes all the way out to the edges. The film just melted in the projector.

Everything goes black.

And there we sit, in the pitch dark in a vast empty auditorium, with John Carpenter's repetitive score still echoing in our heads despite the distant boom of the thunder. And we sit. And sit. There's nervous laughter from a complete stranger sat a few rows behind us. We're kind of laughing too. Kind of.

After a while a nervous manager scurries down the aisle with a torch and apologies. Some time after that Adrienne is restored and we watch the fog consume the lighthouse. By the time the Nostromo starts rumbling across the screen, we're really in the mood to be scared.

My point in relating this anecdote? Simply this: get acquainted with the dark. Watching a zombie movie? Turn off all the lights. Reading about vampires? Do it by candlelight. Just like in The Fog, it's all about sitting round the campfire, this business of ours. And, as everyone knows, campfires spill the best of their magic when the sun goes down.

Effects that are special include ...

... Vermithrax Pejorative in the movie Dragonslayer. A stunning pre-CGI combo of animatronics and Phil Tippett's (at the time) revolutionary go-motion. Favourite shot? Looking down a black tunnel for a beat before she bursts from the shadows, mad as hell, lurching along like the biggest grounded bat you ever saw.

Where does the magic live?

Sooner or later I'll take my well-worn copy of John Crowley's Little, Big off my bookshelf and reread it for what will be the fourth or fifth time. Once again I'll try to work out where he's hidden the magic. And once again, I suspect, I'll fail.

I've always been a proponent of the idea that magic in fiction needs rigorous rules so as to be realistic, but Mr Crowley's more subtle than that. This is a book subtitled The Faeries' Parliament, and yet I don't recall the word 'faerie' ever actually appearing in the text. Everything that could remotely be described as magical occurs so far offstage you could be forgiven for thinking it was happening in another production altogether. And yet ... Little, Big is more soaked in magic than any other book I know.

It seems to me that writing about magic - and here I don't mean whizz-bang spells and bone-crunching shapeshifters, I mean that fundamental sense of the strange - isn't about the words you use at all. It's about the spaces you put between them. In the same way that the faerie folk inhabit those secret glades and walk those paths less trod, so the real magic lurks not in what's spoken, but in what's left unsaid.

It's a clever trick - a kind of literary sleight-of-hand - and John Crowley does it better than most. It's the easest thing in the world to suggest to the reader there's a pixie sitting on his shoulder. Convincing him utterly of the fact without even mentioning it ... that's something else.

Six Word Stories

Okay, so the claim that Ernest Hemingway wrote flash fiction might be an urban legend, but you can't deny there's something seductive about the challenge of writing a story in just six words. Plenty of folk have had a go over at Six Word Stories (including yours truly). Give it a try before all the good words get used up ...

My first time

What's in a cover? Sometimes everything. The first science fiction book I ever bought was the old Granada paperback edition of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, and the thing that made me pick it up was the fabulous Chris Foss spaceship on the cover. But there was more to it than that, enough to make this a truly formative moment. Because next to this book were two others that were clearly part of the same series - Foundation & Empire and Second Foundation. They also had fabulous spaceships on the front. But, as I read the blurb on the back - seductive blurb that promised epic tales of galactic empires and something called psychohistory - I realised something incredible: the three covers fitted together like jigsaw pieces to form a single image! The exotic combination of Granada and Foss had actually created not just a trilogy but a triptych. And I'd discovered it! I was tickled pink. And hooked, for life.

I've discovered all manner of wonders in bookshops over the years, but I can't recall ever being so utterly enchanted as I was that day. Asimov's Foundation launched me on an SF odyssey that lasted through my teens and only began to wane when I wandered into a little Maine town called Castle Rock. The spaceships got the better of me again when the Clear Air Turbulence went on its outrageous spree through the heart of the Culture megaship in Iain Banks's Consider Phlebas. Reading that sequence, I felt the same daft WTF grin on my face that my ten year-old self had worn when I picked up Asimov.

Still, the first time's always the best.

Alex Ruiz

I love this guy's art. Check out his gallery at CGSociety.

The Godwhale

One of the things I thought I'd do here is dredge up a few old memories before they fade forever. I'm not planning to re-read books, or re-view movies, just spill out what's stuck in my head about them. Which will no doubt be utterly subjective and, just possibly, entirely inaccurate. I'll kick off with The Godwhale by TJ Bass. I doubt it's still in print but what I remember most vividly is a hemi-human (I think he got chopped in half by an airlock door?) who got grafted on to a pair of mechanical legs, and a giant robot whale called Rorqual Maru. Someone wound up mind-melding with the whale - possibly even becoming it. Also there was an undersea civilisation of evolved humans with gills called Benthics. Few people I've met have heard of the book, and I really can't say if it was any good, but when I read it at the age of eleven or so it filled my head up with some pretty startling images. I think it's fair to say that, much, much later, some of them got echoed in a novel of mine called Stone and Sea.

Girl in Pieces

Latest news is good, nay great. My fantasy story Girl in Pieces has been selected by Ellen Datlow for her new anthology The Best Horror of the Year Volume One, out in October 2009. Thanks, Ellen! The story first appeared in the recently deceased and even more recently resurrected Realms of Fantasy.

What's burning?

Lots on the burner right now. So I'm on the right frame of mind to kick off this new attempt at blogging. In the last month I've delivered a manuscript and outlined another. I've got two more full-length projects to complete by this time next year, but before the first one fires up I'm trying to squeeze in a zombie story. The way it's going it might turn out to be another novelette but, hey, what's in a name?