White Lego

There are ghosts in the wiring. There is electricity in the weather.

She crosses the Tappan Zee bridge, cantilevered over the Hudson. On the station at White Plains, there's a brown paper bag, simple, beautiful, almost as if it has been ironed. Her name is written on it in kanji. Inside, there is an iPod and a Sony Vaio. She puts the iPod in the assymetrical pocket of her Commes des Garcons jacket. She puts the Vaio in the nearest bin. There were moments to go with that post-ironic techno-wonk hipster routine, but there are limits, she thought. Microsoft was the limit.

"Vista," she said, making it sound like a swearword in Lithuanian. Hasta la vista.

Manhattan looms, way Ballardian. Now she stands before the door of the Brill building. Why not? It's very cool. Hours of hand-rubbed Brasso have burnished the entrance; you can smell the money, taste the decades of bubblegum pop in the air.



She's bluetoothed in now to Harryshouseandharrystakehomepay.net. Humungous Bigmouth is showing up on the brushed chrome caller ID.

"There'll be a car there any minute," he says. "Can you see a Bugatti on the corner?"

"No," she subvocalises, through the ceramic bone mic hardwired into her Ray Bans, from which she has meticulously filed off the logo.

"It's customised slightly. A client in the former Macedeonia. It looks like a cement mixer."

"I see it," she says, glancing automatically behind her, where the man in the DKNY suit and the Ralph Lauren shirt and the Calvin Klein underpants has stopped to look in the window of the Bauhaus reproduction furniture shop for the third time. Too often, she thinks.

"Underbuilt, by current standards," says the old man, who is suddenly at her elbow, clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee. He pushes the Bulgarian gun into the pocket of her Prada raincoat, which she had had specially vulcanized in Prague so that it looks like a Burberry rip-off picked up at Changi airport.

"The man, or the vehicle?" she asks.

"Both, if necessary."

"What the fuck's going on?" she says. It is as if a dark shadow, like a Black Ops helicopter passing overhead, has moved in on the scene.

"Search me." Standing there on the sidewalk, he gives the impression that he's sitting in a Ray and Charles Eames chair and has his feet on the matching recliner. "There's this odd film on the internet that might explain it. If you speak Russian."

What I read on my holidays

Some of these are shameful admissions, since I should have read them ages ago, but they were (not including sf for review books; coming soon to a Daily Telegraph near you):

The Book of Dave, Will Self.

Rather good, I thought. The orthography is certainly a challenge at first and, which I found annoying, stays that way; though I can't complain about it, since it is meticulously consistent. I kept fearing it would fall over the edge into childishness, the central conceit being so jokey; it never did, I thought. Strange and beautiful and moving - and properly even-handed and interested in the desire of Dave for his son and his general uselessness as a father. The motos are inspired, but I should have liked to have known something about CalBioTech's part in it all. Still, the book wasn't set up that way. You've all read it, I suppose, but I liked it quite a lot.

Soon I shall be Invincible, Austin Grossman

Yes, fine. But not literary enough to make it a good subversion of comics. I started out thinking this is fantastic; halfway through I wondered why it wasn't a comic. Then I realized it would be the same comic as lots of other comics. But such a good idea, and well enough written.

Spook Country, William Gibson

Wonderful. Will write about this again. But I loved Pattern Recognition, and I loved this, though it is not sf, nor even a very good thriller. Plot is not his long suit. But such splendid moments. A real pleasure to read.

Harry Potter and whatever it is this time

No, I'm fed up with this. OK, it wraps up the ends. Nothing happens for most of it, and there are sentences which are an affront to the language. Still, she's a genius who has created characters as enduring, I'll bet, as Holmes and Bond and Poirot and The Famous Five. There are attempts to deal with real issues here; it's a bit by the numbers for me, but then I'm not 8. But my 8 year old was a bit underwhelmed, too.

Polar Star, Red Square, Havana Bay, Martin Cruz Smith

I liked Gorky Park quite a lot. These are not quite as good, in descending order. Polar Star is pretty good, Red Square is OK, Havana Bay is disappointing. He can write, but only in a limited sort of way. Good for planes and beaches. I didn't bother bringing them back home.

The Last King of Scotland, Giles Foden

I haven't seen the film. Now I want to. Terrific book, I thought, because it's so well written. Not sure I cared about the story, but I cared about the sentences. I must read his other books, to see if he can do other voices.

Katherine Mansfield Short Stories

Well, they're fab, aren't they?

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

I'm sorry, I almost forgot this. That will be my shame at not having read it ages ago. He's fantastic at having an idea and telling a story. But he has no ear at all for the way in which people wrote or thought or spoke. None. He habitually makes basic grammatical errors which would be fine in any one person's voice, but would hardly be likely to be shared (like a comet shaped birthmark) across the generations. He can't know anything at all about music (though his nasty musical amanuensis is, despite that, much the best-realised character) or about 1970s Californian private eye conventions (the Rockford Files was so much better). The politics is infantile. Yet here is a clever men who can write well and is a born novelist. Where are the editors to tell him what works and what doesn't? A couple of minor tweaks, three weeks' work, and this would have been terrific. As it is, it's a shocking waste of what could have been excellent.


Potrazi i pronadi s Tomicon

Thomas searches for the Fat Controller. Is he in the engine shed? Ne, on nije odvje! To je Percy! Behind the station hut? Ne! To je Bero! Dolazi li on preko mosta? Ne! To je Hari! Svi Traze Debeljkica. Je li on ispod velikog suncobrana? Well, that's just where you're wrong! You have to look behind the sandcastle hidden behind it! Da! On je tamo!

Obviously a masterpiece, since I read it approximately 2,000 times more than all the others put together.

Hot dog, jumping frog

Blogger says "Say you live in Albuquerque, count the Smashing Pumpkins among your favourite bands, and like sushi. Blogger makes it easier to find people who share your interests."
But what if you don't? I like Albuquerque (it has three or four very good secondhand bookshops and a nice pub called the Cedar Tavern), but I've never heard anything by the Smashing Pumpkins and I don't like sushi all that much. Though I woud have said a year ago that I didn't like it at all. Now I quite like small bits of it in small doses. Give it time. Perhaps this time next year I'll be a sushi fiend in a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt, living in the EconoLodge in Albuquerque, where dried leaves roll into the empty swimming pool. Come to think of it, I don't know where you get sushi in Albuquerque.
Stephen Donaldson lives there. You could ask him. Actually, many sf and fantasy writers live in New Mexico - the "Land of Enchantment", as the airport bus tells you, endlessly, on your way to the car hire lot.

Today's food: hamburger/spinach noodles with chicken, chilli, baby corn, mangetout, green beans, peppers, spring onions and ginger.
Today's books: Soon I will be Invincible/Spook Country
Tomorrow's destination: Croatia

Wednesday night

Back home, but with little to say for myself.
At the wedding I went to in Scotland, all the women knew a sort of line dance called The Slosh. I asked one of the men how it was that they all knew these individually simple, but (taken as a routine) moderately complicated steps. He said: "It's a thing women know." We left it at that.
I got sent Charles Stross's Halting State, which I think is out in America, but is not published here until next year. God knows what the Americans will make of it. It's very Scottish (though know he isn't, not really). I think it's very good fun.
I am accepting bids for anyone needing summarised or sent up (in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges, Lee Child, Jay McInerney or Robert M Pirsig), if only to give me an excuse to read something other than the thousands of review copies clogging my in-tray. Perhaps it ought to be William Gibson, once I've read the new one. But all offers considered.
Bear in mind I have other bogs and stuff, not to mention a day job writing, and it's the summer holidays. If it's quiet here, I may just be sitting in the garden. And?

sf writers advise the usa. In God We Trust.

This story is all over the shop: usa today's version is at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-05-29-deviant-thinkers-security_N.htm?csp=34 I must learn how to do that thing where you write here and it shows up in blue and you just click on it. Anyone know how?

I'm now going to try it to this. Ha! It works. Thank you Farah. Now I know html and shall conquer the world. Mwahahahaha! Thank you to sour grapes (first comment below) who I think is really called alan, but i don't have any globe things with goggles on them on my machine or display. Do you perhaps use some evil Microsoft-style system? Anyway, back to the post, but you can expect future posts to show off with thises and heres all over the place. Ha!

USA Today is news for beginners, of course, though it once described me as one of the best and most famous obituarists in the world. A crowded field, eh? I've written a bit about these advisors at the other blog (click on the right), but they haven't put it up yet. That is the trouble with mediated blogs.
Well. A few additional thoughts, and remember that I'm a conservative; that I take the view that 9/11 did make a difference, and I know whose side I'm on in the war against terror (though it's a bloody stupid way of describing it); that there was a case (though not the case which was presented) for invading Iraq; that the removal of Saddam Hussein was an unequivocally good thing; that George Bush is not a blithering idiot; and that I like Larry Niven and Greg Bear's books well enough, and don't feel the need to throw Jerry Pournelle's stuff across the room all that often.
Remember too that I am a liberal in the British conservative tradition, and think that the defence of individual liberty is more important than catch-all legislation which may or may not (it will not, actually) do anything to reduce terrorist threats; that the right to freedom of speech is well-nigh indivisible (even on race-, sex-, religion- and sexuality-based issues) or else worthless, that I am fervently opposed to ID cards, DNA profiling, and imprisonment without trial; and that I wrote the introduction to a book called Glorifying Terrorism which contains many good stories by top Leftie sf writers and was edited by the nice and clever Farah Mendlesohn who wouldn't agree with me on 99.999 per cent of anything if you paid her.
The first is the point I make over at the Telegraph, but slightly differently. Why restrict it to the physics graduates with the postgraduate degrees? They're the ones to ask about tachyons and building a space station. Or even, at a pinch, what sort of mobile phone masts will do the job well.
But what governments want to know is how people will actually behave. I suspect they wouldn't like the answers that they'd get from Bruce Sterling and Ken MacLeod and Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and Charles Stross and so on, but aren't these the guys that are quoted by newspapers and advising coolhunters and corporations and all that? (Ken MacLeod is now going to email me saying "As if. I could do with the money.")
Well, if Pepsi and Hyundai aren't seeking his advice, or some continental university appointing him professor of the public understanding of the networked future, that's their loss. Don't blame me. Except, of course, that you'd be nuts to take his advice. But you should listen very carefully to his arguments.
The more serious objection to Sigma is that they're volunteers. You should never take advice from a gang of people who've signed up to tell you that you're fundamentally on the right track. You need a group made up of some people who think you've not gone nearly far enough, some who think you're mad, and some who think you may have got it right, but only by accident and for all the wrong reasons, and that disaster looms unless you listen to them.
But only I, in all of this debate, can be counted upon to speak any sense at all. Twas ever thus.

Omaha Hi/Lo Back/Front

I have acquired a thing which delights me greatly, even though it has been produced by a modern artist. Parallel Cards, by Ryan Gander (an obvious pseudonym for Madame Sosostris), is a pack of playing cards, the backs of which are the faces of different playing cards. In other words, the untouched pack procedes normally Ace through King of Spades, then ditto Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds. The back of the Ace of Spades is (in my pack - I don't know whether he's produced variants) the Qh, of the 2s the Js, the 3s the Qd, the 4s the 3c... you get the idea. The possibilities are fantastic. Poker with the back of your hand providing the pool cards for your opponents, for example. Bridge with the option to bid for a hand to be turned over. Gin with the option to flip over melds and extend longer runs. I've already worked out a good variant on find the lady with the (true) Jh, which is backed by the 7s, the (true) 7s, backed by the 9s, and the (true) 9s, backed, very satisfyingly, with the Jh. The punter can see (on one side) that it is a perfectly ordinary deck, and the card on top has a normal red back. That can be turned over to an identical design in black.

I like it as much as The Great Bear. Maybe even more.

I was in Cambridge today talking in a studio about Vonnegut and very nearly had a drink after I came out. I went into a bookshop until the urge passed. Consequently I now have two books on Philip K Dick (like I need more books on him; I've got nearly as many about him as I have by him, and I've got, I'm pretty sure, all of them now, even the straight novels which I don't like as much) and half a dozen novels I should have read already but haven't. Not classics - there are loads of them I haven't read, of course - but things like Gibson's Pattern Recognition and The Book of Dave by Will Self which I just never got round to getting. I get these in the door and am now torn between reading instead books I have got and have read, and could have reread at any time without being prompted by getting new ones. Specifically, I want to read Idoru, Sutin's biography of PKD and Riddley Walker. I can't find my copy of Riddley Walker. Now I don't want to read anything else.

not reading: Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
sf: Jem, Frederik Pohl
crime: Polar Star, Martin Cruz Smith (we haven't had that before, have we?)
if it's new to you: The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet
dinner was fish and chips. I will write about the religious implications of this at some point.

Just What Is It About Today's Yesterday-based Tomorrows That Makes Them So Different, So Appealing?

I’m not thinking of the appeal of Victorian and Edwardian sf, but of the books I mentioned earlier, for which “steampunk” is probably as useful and as hideous a label as any. Of course, Wells and Verne can be retrospectively claimed for it, but only in the way that they are filtered through the kind of sensibility shown by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In other words, War of the Worlds wasn’t written as steampunk, but it can now be read as it. (In David Lodge’s Small World, Persse McGarrigle, the graduate student, proposes a book about TS Eliot’s influence on Shakespeare.)
But I think what I like about The Difference Engine and so on is largely what I like about Wells and Conan Doyle and Stevenson. The difference is that in the latter the items which are costume and props – top hats, frock coats, hansom cabs, gaslight, snuffboxes, you name it – are, for the writers, the normal items providing verisimilitude for everyday life; only the Martian tripods are exotic. But modern books set at the turn of the last century or some close version of it, we can’t help but be aware, are appropriating these bits of décor as things every bit as foreign to us as the Martians. Thus you get two bites at the cherry.
Science fiction, as no one connected with it ever gets tired of saying, is not about predicting the future but about elucidating the present. And while the future has this advantage over the past, that you can change it; the past has this advantage over the future, that you can know it.
One interesting example of knowing that the trappings of (then) contemporary life can be seen as if by alien eyes occurs at the very beginning of GK Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill, when he describes the buttons at the back of frock coats as being like the eyes of black dragons, and then says that the London of the future is almost exactly like the London of today. The book was published in 1904 and, strangely enough, set in 1984.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is, of course, a reasonable extrapolation from the politics of 1948. But the atmosphere of the film (which was brilliantly set-designed and costumed) is a 1980s view of 1948’s view of the 1980s. You have to conclude that Baudrilliard was on to something with all that hyper-reality stuff. More on that later.

sf: The Game Players of Titan, Philip K Dick
crime: Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man, Ed McBain
discover: The King, Donald Barthelme
listening to: La Forza del Destino, Verdi, with Maria Caniglia (Torino, RAI, 1942)
getting ready to cook: char siu pork with fried noodles