Neal Stephenson

I have started reading Anathem. It is as gigantic as everything else he's written during the past few years. But we have till September before it needs to be written about. Just as well, really.

Paul Kincaid

Among the interesting things he said this evening was that what had given The Separation, by Christopher Priest, the edge over M John Harrison's Light in the Clarke Awards was the view that you would always enjoy reading the latter as the same book, but that Priest's novel was a different book every time you returned to it.

And I see what he means, and that that can be an attraction. Certainly, I love Priest's books (though I would rate The Glamour far above The Separation).

But Light continues to spill around me in umpteen different ways; Nova Swing has made it the more difficult to read it even from that (singular) point of view. I'd always thought that was the point of them.

With Harrison, I find myself going back again and again into the short stories: Egnaro and Gifco particularly enrage me. He won't agree, but I think the best work is in them and Climbers, and, of course, in The Course of the Heart. But the Viriconium fans have me outnumbered.

Iain M Banks

Just back from seeing him being interviewed by Farah Mendlesohn at Imperial, and us all eating curry afterwards. I can't write about Matter yet, though I don't think it's giving too much away to say that I think it's very good. What he certainly is is a star turn as a speaker. I particularly like his frank acknowledgement that a large part of the fun of science fiction rests on no more than naked wish fulfillment. Banks has no time, he claimed, for the Calvinist view that life is there to be endured. As long as your idea of fun isn't shooting up a school, why not have fun and realize your wishes?
That seems reasonable, though not in my view incompatible with a cheery sort of belief (Chesterton rather than John Knox, perhaps). It was nice to see a writer admit to the one thing that really marks the good work in the genre, and which almost everyone else denies hotly. If sf is going to work, you need to feel the writer thinks he's coming up with really cool stuff (even if he disapproves of it).

Upcoming

Spent the journey in this morning writing four short reviews (which involved reading more than a dozen books) for a roundup, to arrive and discover a large ad had sold, and they wanted two very short ones. Oh well. I suppose I may be alble to do the next one a bit sooner for that reason. What I hope you'll get soon in the Telegraph is Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels and Charlie Stross's Atrocity Archive and Jennifer Morgue.

What's been held over from today is the Peter F Hamilton and Hunter's Run; but there are a few other books I'd like to have included, so I can add them to that pair and get another one soon, I hope. It's much harder to write 150 words on something in sf - especially if you've ploughed through 650 pages of PFH, for example, which you can only really write about if you've read the previous two 650pp tomes in the same series, than it is to knock out 850 words on anything else. Still, I suppose I asked for it.

Future Classics: Schild's Ladder arrived this morning. It doesn't really glow in the dark, or not very successfully.

Future Classics

Nice Gollancz have sent me seven paperbacks (though they list eight in this series) with very snazzy covers. I've got them all already. I've read them all already, except for Paul McAuley's (I beg your pardon - having been declared a future classic, he's now Paul J McAuley) Fairyland. I'm ashamed of that, because Mr McAuley is a very nice man indeed, who has bought me several pints. The least I can do is read his books. His very good new book is called Cowboy Angels. Multidimensional Americas. But I will review it properly. So now I will read Fairyland.

But from the standard of the other titles, Gollancz may be on to something with this rebranding exercise. Evolution features a flock wallpaper ape. The Separation has classy brown paper aeroplanes (if you've got the original Scribner paperback, you'd be horrified at how much it's worth; they only printed about five of them, being bastards and idiots. Mr Priest got the last laugh there). I don't understand the Dan Simmonds cover, but it's one of the most in your face first sentences in sf. Revelation Space is appropriately shiny. And so on.

My doubt is Altered Carbon. Entertaining, yes. Successful, undoubtedly. Classic... well, maybe. Perhaps Ryman and Harrison and Banks and Mieville and Grimwood and Roberts and MacLeod and lots of those other folk don't need pushing as future classics. The list is (in no order):

Hyperion, Dan Simmonds
Evolution, Stephen Baxter
Fairyland, Paul J McAuley
Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds
The Separation, Christopher Priest
Blood Music, Greg Bear
Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan

The missing one - listed inside - is Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. He has strong views on quotations on book jackets (he's agin the idea), and I wonder if that has caused some difficulty with it. I will ask people who might know.

british sf continues its march across mitteleuropa

I was in Croatia. Now I'm back. I'll tell you all about it soon. You'll remember my pleasure at having seen Jon Courtney Grimwood in Bratislava. Well, here is Ken MacLeod in Zadar.


More Slovakian, Serbo-Croat and other exciting sightings as I get 'em, folks. Zbogom!

Dune

John Clute has written an obituary for Sterling Lanier in The Independent (you don't expect me to link to them, do you?) Lanier's claim to fame was that he was the editor at Chilton Books who got Dune published. It had been turned down by about 20 pubishers before that.
What can one say about Dune? It is the acme of sf in some ways at least. It is proflix, pompous and utterly adolescent melodrama of Messaianic wish-fulfilment, terrorism, ludicrous philosophy, imaginary history, mind-control, telepathy, martial arts, exotic natives, clan warfare, aristocratic snobbery, cod-profundity, mind-expanding drugs, garbled syncretic religions, vicious monsters. What hasn't it got? It's fantastic. I love it. The sequels get progressively worse. The Dosadi Experiment is my favourite of the non-Dune books by Frank Herbert. I suppose I had better now seek out Sterling Lanier's books.

Walter Tevis

A nice thing amongst this morning's consignment of books; Walter Tevis's Mockingbird has come out in Gollancz's sf Masterworks series (number 70). I've long thought that Tevis is underrated, as both a mainstream and an sf writer. Of course, he did very well out of The Hustler and The Colour of Money (which was I think published just after his death, but he'd had the film money before he died). I think the latter not all that terrific, but The Hustler, like Cool Hand Luke and The Cincinnati Kid, is one of those books which rattles round in your head. I don't know how much of that is due to the films, but I'd like to think not all of it. I've written about this before.
The Man Who Fell To Earth is a great film (Nicolas Roeg), and a wonderful book. You probably know them, but if not, seek both out. Mockingbird is the other end of the story, in a way. It's about the remnants of humanity, sopored and hashed up to the eyeballs, overseen by a robot with a vague memory of humanity (his brain was mapped on a person's) and a yearning for suicide which he cannot fulfill.
Thomas Newton is equally alienated. He's an alien, failing to manage on Earth, and unable to go back home. TMWFTE is the becoming a drunk book; Mockingbird is the stopping being a drunk book. The human couple stop taking their drugs, learn to read, and don't really find happiness. Spofforth's epiphany is of an ecstatic realisation, coupling the spiritual uplift with literal descent - like Jocelin at the end of The Spire. Except with robots, obviously.
Tevis didn't publish anything much between finishing The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1961 or so and Mockingbird in 1980. He was drinking in Ohio. He stopped in 1975. From 1980 he wrote a book a year, including another sf novel, The Steps of the Sun, which I've never read, and one other, fairly, straight novel, The Queen's Gambit, about chess. It's not The Defence (by Nabokov). Having finished The Colour of Money in 1984, he was planning to go back to sf. He died of lung cancer later that year.

Breakfast in America

The only tolerable meal possible there. Except for the coffee, which isn't. Well of course that is overstatement, but though a good hamburger and chips is a fine thing, you don't want to eat it very often. But there is nothing else that isn't ruined in some way. Jumbo shrimp. Yes please. With a blue cheese and honey mustard remoulade dipping sauce? No thank you. You want cheese with that? Certainly not. You don't seriously call that cheese, do you?
But I love America and Americans. They are very polite and kind and open people, as I agreed this evening with my friend Harry Mount, the well-known Latin lover.
I have had passed on to me by Richard Hyfler, an American friend, some of the reading list which Donald Barthelme gave him when he was a student of his. The students all read it expecting to be asked about it at some point. They never were. Here they are.

Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez
Watt, Beckett
The Marquise of O, von Kleist
The Vintage Rabelais
At Swim Two Birds, Flann O'Brien

Not a surprising list, really. That'll make up for the recommendations having been few and far between recently. I'll try to be more diligent.

Science fiction news: Telegraph roundup coming. I will post a link when it comes out. Saw Jon Courtney Grimwood this evening. He has been to Mexico, because he is writing about the poem that Paradise Lost was going to be. Am about to start The Dreaming Void, by Peter F Hamilton, because it's out in August, and it will probably take that long, because I can't read more than about 950 pages a day. He can write that in an hour.

This is pointless except in my continuing bid to look more like Philip K Dick and show off the silly things you can do with my new computer. It will have to do until I can get Richard Linklater to Rotoscope me.



Lunch was Chinese noodles and tea.
Dinner was a beef and watercress sandwich.

I'm listening to: thunder.

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.

Reviewing: the coalface

Today I am at home and am going to try to write a roundup. That will be three or four books at a grand total of about 650 words. If we're really lucky, the paper will run one of those every two months or so. The stuff on the floor is the sf pending file. The stuff on the wall is the sf background reading. This is the garden office. You should see the house.

Writers, publishers, publicity departments, this is what you are up against.

First things first

Onwards! One review filed, so now I should be reading more books including, but not limited to, the new titles by Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Steph Swainston and Richard Morgan. And no doubt several others.
Instead, of course, I finished Neil Gaiman, finished (for the fourth time) The Diamond Age and read the text of Mamet's A Life in the Theatre. Plays are fantastic; you can read them in about a tenth of the time it takes to watch them, and go back again and again. And I love Mamet; this is great on the page, with the sort of pitch-blende appeal of Donald Barthelme or WG Sebald (when he's not being too pompous) and very funny.
I was going to write about the Neal Stephenson but there's too much there. Another day, maybe. I know nothing about steampunk, really, but I like The Difference Engine, The Diamond Age and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic obviously, the film was a shocking disappointment. All that money wasted). Above all, though, I love John Crowley's Great Work of Time. And I love what they're all descended from, or at least what their set dressing is descended from; Stevenson's Suicide Club, Conan Doyle, bits of Chesterton. But I haven't thought it through.
So how do you choose which books to read while you're avoiding the books you should read? If you've read them before you try a few lines or paragraphs at random and then think "Wow, that was great, I'd forgotten how good this is". If it's PG Wodehouse or Ed McBain, you've also forgotten what happened because they're all exactly the same and all reliably brilliant. In a bookshop, you read the first line. (Or two or three.)
Here is the trouble: if it's too good, it's slightly offputting. You can get round this by taking the Earthly Powers approach, the most shameless first line ever. That says, I know this is a problem, watch me joke my way out of it. You can save the punch for the second sentence (Gravity's Rainbow, Catch 22). Both of those establish tone without risking everything on it. You can put all your cards on the table (Lolita). Watch me, I'm writing, that says. Or you can knock the ball right out of the park (One Hundred Years of Solitude). I think the last is probably the best first line I can think of, but it does more or less declare: "I am that good, and what follows is a masterpiece, so get used to it". Fortunately for Marquez, that works in that instance.
Another thing to do is similar to plumping for titles like Mrs Dalloway or Barchester Towers or David Copperfield (Dickens was the undoubted master of using titles that way), and just bidding for iconic status for the character. "Howard Roark laughed" (The Fountainhead - good title, lousy book) is a shining example of this falling flat on its face. Most of us laughed more at the end of the film, perhaps the kitchest scene ever commited to celuloid.
There was a cartoon once (it must have been in The New Yorker; it's the archetypal New Yorker kind of cartoon) of Dickens in his publisher's office. The publisher is saying: "It was either the best of times or it was the worst of times. It can scarcely have been both."
William Gibson's Neuromancer has a very good first line, but I am going to stick my neck out. The best first line in sf appears in Bruce Sterling's Involution Ocean. But please, contradict me. If there are better ones, that will be another load of books I shouldn't be reading.
I haven't bothered to type all these examples in, because it's dead easy to find most of them on the web. Or read the books. There will be no similar post on the best last line ever, since that is Middlemarch, as any fule kno. The best opening chapter is If On a Winter's Night a Traveller.
Today I had Chinese food (what? again?) for lunch, and tortelloni with cherry tomatoes, black olives, capers, chili and sping onions for dinner. With garlic bread, Peter Kay fans.

sf: The Great Work of Time, John Crowley. And Little, Big. OK, it's fantasy, not sf, but it's wonderful.
crime: The Case of the Seven of Calvary, Anthony Boucher
discover: The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien (I know it's well known, but you can't be too evangelical about it)
listening to: Wurttemberg Sonata No 1, CPE Bach, Glenn Gould