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 He's starred in six short stories (plus a hot-off-the-press but as-yet-unpublished manuscript for a novel called String City) and his name isn't mentioned once.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?