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 I counted up the other day and that brings my total output to twelve novels (including two unpublished) with the thirteenth due for delivery in February.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!