Aftercon

So, Newcon went well. Three days of chat, drink, chat, drink, the occasional panel (I was on one, but wasn’t able to offer much of a contribution) and lovely books.

Top five moments:

• Meeting up with friends – Gary, Andrew, Michaela, Sam, Paul, Al, Heather, Debbie, Tiffany, Chaz, John (of course), Chris, Tony (but no Eric, sadly) and actually getting time to talk to them for a change as a result of the membership being so petite, and making many new ones too
• Understanding why Resurrection Cola is so named, and being glad to see the restorative effects of the convention experience taking effect too
• Getting that old inspiration rush once again, boosted by – rather than dampened – public humiliation by certain well kent faces in the business. I shall never watch Family Guy in the same way again.
• Holding the marvellous Subterfuge anthology in my sticky little hands
• Una McCormack’s story “The Great Gig In The Sky” in said book, read on the long journey homeward.

Newcon was well timed for me in a multitude of ways, and I’ve rolled out the other side of it in great creative shape. And that – as they say in the hokey-cokey – is what it’s all about.

Roll on Eastercon.

In with the New/Ain’t no lie

Conventions. I love them. They come at just the right times to wrench you out of the workaday and let you just hang out with your friends in a bar, for three or four days. Usually, I do two a year. Eastercon at, well, Easter, and Fantasycon in September. Occasionally, if I’m feeling flush I might fly over to World Fantasy, but those two are my routine. This year, for various and banal reasons, I had to miss Fcon, but I’m making up for it this coming weekend with Newcon in Northampton. Guests of honour are Iain M Banks, Ken McLeod and Storm Constantine, and there will be a whole bunch of other writery types in attendance too. So, if you’re in the area, I can recommend it.

Also, at Newcon, will be the launch of the Newcon Press anthology (yes, they’re related – there’s two incredibly hard working and enthusiastic men called Ian behind the whole thing).  The Newcon Press anthology series has now reached its 4th volume (5th if you count the BSFA 50th anniversary book, Celebration), and they have all carried a great mix of well known names and newcomers in the UK SF scene. The new volume, titled Subterfuge, looks like it will be no exception. There are new stories by John Meaney, Neal Asher, Pat Cadigan, Tanith Lee, Tony Ballantine, Juliet McKenna and Gary Couzens (and I was delighted to contribute a little something too).

So, if you make it to Northampton – see you at the launch.

Untinted spectacles

Unlike many who write genre fiction, I didn’t grow up reading the stuff. Don’t know, it just never appealed to me. My loss, I guess, but one benefit it has left me with is the distinct lack of rose in my spectrum when viewing the older works in the genre.

When I first joined GSFWC I went on a bit of a crusade so I could get up to speed with the “background knowledge” that everyone else seemed to have. I made a list of the classic writers and hit Obelist Books and Future shop for examples. I read one Clarke (Childhood’s End – enjoyed the idea-quota, but couldn’t believe how quickly the story was skimmed), two Le Guin (Dispossessed and LHoD – loved them), a Delaney (Nova – again, loved it), and got on okay with Poul Anderson, Cordwainer Smith and James Blish too. On the other hand I found Asimov and Heinlein unreadable. But that’s just me.

Anyway, it came as little surprise that to read Ian Sales decrying the relevance of classic status. I kind of agree with him. SF writing is way more sophisticated than it was forty or fifty years ago, and it would seem a bit pointless to still hold those texts up as the best we have to offer, but on the other hand we’re looking at them out of context. At the time, they made a big splash for good reasons. They were all about challenging the ways people thought about the world, the universe, about science and the future. They were about challenging people – writers and readers alike – to expand their imaginations. They weren’t about good literary standards. No-one pretended they were, or indeed really cared much.

More importantly, they were stepping stones on the path to where the genre is now. And in my opinion, the surest and farthest bridging of those stepping stones deserve the status “Classics”. Just as long as they’re viewed in the correct historical context.

Paul Raven has issued a challenge over on Futurismic for anyone to name a Classic that they actually would recommend to someone. Well, I still occasionally dip into the the boxes of yellow spines and almost as yellow pages in a spare half hour in the dealer’s room, and this year I picked up a copy of Vance’s The Killing Machine. And you know what, yeah, I’d recommend it. It’s a good adventure yarn that skips a long at a rate of knots with little in the way of extraneous material to derail you. It’s short. The writing’s not at all bad. And most of all – it’s LOADS OF FUN.

The Taste Of Mundanity

So, the Mundane SF issue of Interzone has come and gone. In case you’ve not been aware, there was a whole bunch of foohfarah about the Mundane manifesto, because I don’t know, the rhetoric rubbed people up the wrong way or something. And that was rekindled when IZ announced they were handing over the reins to Geoff Ryman and co for one issue. I’ve not seen any bloggings of seething vindication on either side since the issue came out, but that doesn’t mean the war ain’t raging somewhere.

Anyway. *Yawn*. Doesn’t matter.

My overall reaction to the seven stories that Ryman and friends have selected to exemplify their point is 1/ they are uniformly good, and 2/ this is the sort of stuff Interzone used to publish more regularly than it does now. I felt nostalgic. Nostalgic for the time when a copy of Interzone would throw you a flight of fancy and then on the next page tie you right back down to earth with a gritty, near-future piece that really made you think. Take a galaxy spanning Stephen Baxter or a baroque Richard Calder and follow it up with Greg Egan’s “Learning To Be Me” or Iain McLeod’s “Well Loved” or Chris Beckett’s “Welfare Man” stories. Really stretch your mind. I’m not saying that IZ doesn’t still strive to do this – David Mace’s “This Happens” still lives fresh in my memory – but it’s not as frequent as I remember it being.

So, if the Mundanistas are complaining that people generally aren’t writing enough of this kind of carefully considered, predictive SF; if it’s a spice, a flavour we’ve lost, then maybe they’re right. Especially if they’re as well written as Lavie Tidhar’s “How To Make Paper Aeroplanes”, or Elizabeth Vonarburg’s “The Invisibles”, or Geoff Ryman’s wholly thought-provoking “Talk Is Cheap”, which rounds off the fiction offering of the issue perfectly.

So, Mundane SF. Do I like it? Yes, when it’s done as well as this.

Will I write it? Probably, sometimes, but like most genre writers, not all the time.

Put it this way, if I were a chef I wouldn’t cook with it exclusively, but it’d be a flavour I’d be wanting to use more often in my restaurant.

Thanks to IZ for reminding us what it tastes like.

Post-orbital

So Eastercon has been and gone once again in an other-worldly flash.

I’m not going to do a con report – there wouldn’t be any point because I didn’t do much except talk to people – but here are ten impressions that have managed to persist through the haze of alcohol and sleep deprivation.

1/ Where did they put them all? I’ve been at every Eastercon since my first one in 1994, bar one – which was the last time it was held at Heathrow. I think that was 1996, and I remember thinking it was a weird sort of place to hold a convention. Would anyone go? Well loads of people went to this one, many more than an Eastercon normal sees. The funny thing was that you never really saw them. I suspect the hotel’s weird geometry neatly packed the extra bodies into alternative dimensional spaces.

2/ The business end The first (and really only) thing that I really had to do during the weekend was have the “agent chat”. Having arrived in the bar a little early I got myself a drink and waited while he conducted a meeting with another client. Only, as the hour arrived, for him to get up suddenly and sprint out the door. Not the most encouraging start, but once we’d sorted things out it was a good meeting. Meetings with my agent are always good meetings, and I always leave inspired, enthused and optimistic.

3/ Comparative beerological economics So after last night’s GSFWC I bought a round of 2 pints of Smiths, 2 of Real Ale and 2 bags of crisps at the Wetherspoon. It cost me £8.70. A similar round in the Con bar (actually bars because you couldn’t have got all that in the one place) would have been half as much again. In the Polo Bar (I keep wanting to say “Polo Lounge” for some reason), it’d have been doubled. And the beer wasn’t as good. It’s a small gripe, but I’m just saying. It was a pricey old weekend.

4/ Oh, curry where art thou? The one thing I really missed this year was the communal curry. Some of the guys went for one on the Saturday when I wasn’t around, but in general Heathrow doesn’t lend itself to popping out to sample the local cuisine. Bradford, nxt year should solve that issue.

5/ New books for old Allowed myself a small splurge on books for the first time in a few years. Here’s the haul: Celebration (BSFA 50th Anniversary anthology) edited by Ian Whates, Myth-Understandings (latest of the NewCon Press anthologies) also edited by the ubiquitous Mr Whates, Other Voices by Andrew Humphrey (bringing me up to date with Elastic Press, and pre-ordered the next two as well), The Reef by Mark Charan Newton (superbly presented novel from Pendragon Press, from a writer I have really high hopes for), The Situation by Jeff Vandermeer (georgeous wee novella just out from PS, see 6/), Debatable Space by Philip Palmer (was introduced to Philip during the weekend, and will be interested to see if the TV drama side of his work influences his space operas).

6/ Here’s The Situation I’ve been looking forward to reading Vandermeer’s The Situation ever since I heard he’d sold it to PS. Vandermeer and PS is a marriage made in heaven. Truly lovely book, I read a little each morning and a little each night during the con. It’s a baroque, grotesque redrawing of contemporary office politics that’s pretty hard to describe, but I saw a description of it that summed it up like this: Dilbert in Gormenghast. That pretty much nails it. Buy it and read it, and never complain about your 9 to 5 again.

7/ One for the road Monday at cons, you get restless and bored. You’re pretty much talked out, and everyone else feels the same, so you go looking for diversions. The book room’s a good standby for a diversion. Normally I go in looking for a handful of new books I’ve heard about and want to pick up, and my eye blocks out everything else. A convention Monday is the time to go and actually look at all those old PBs, and wonder what they’re actually like. I got it into my head that they were exactly the right size for my jacket pocket and would be ideal fodder for the airport, so I set myself the challenge of finding a classic novel of no more than 150 pages, with not too gaudy a cover and costing less than two quid. This proved a challenge because there were hundreds of books that fit that bill. In the end though I settled on Vance’s The Killing Machine, and you know what? It’s brilliant fun. I think I shall make this an Eastercon ritual.

8/ There’s a little sausage! I was accosted with those words on Saturday night. I won’t say by whom or what they meant by it, just that I took it as a compliment. Of sorts.

9/ All the people, so many people At this point I should point out that the thing I like most about cons is having chats with my friends. It’s great to meet old friends, even if it’s only in passing in the corridor, and meet new ones. That for me is what cons are all about, and the real reason I don’t go to that many programme items. And this year the programme was burgeoning with good and varied things to go see – of the things I did see I enjoyed a right good presentation of Andrew J Wilson’s play about Rod Serling, The Terminal Zone, Gaiman and Ryman talking enthusiastically about Fantastic London, and the rather giddy fnarrfest that was Sex And The Singularity that had moderator Paul Raven trying to hide in his beard in embarassment.

10/ The wheels on the bus Fun as the whole convention business is, I was very glad to get away from it all on Saturday and visit my sister’s house for dinner, where my brother, sister, brother in law and I were treated to a rock concert by my 2 year old nephew. The boy’s got talent. He’ll go far.

All in all a grand weekend.

A moment of praise…

…for Keith Brooke’s Infinity Plus.

Over the last ten years Keith has grown IP into a colossal repository for great, free, short genre fiction, and that’s not counting the fine selection of reviews, interviews and other bits and bobs. Sadly, the site has become too much work to keep going now, so Keith’s calling it a day. It will remain available for folks to read, but it won’t be updated from now on.

Go on over and have a rummage, there’s some great stuff in there. And if you enjoy what you find you might want to pledge a little cash to sponsor Keith’s efforts in the Great North Run. He’s raising cash for the homeless.

Thanks Keith – for everything.

And the winner is…

Having been fortunate enough to have both of my books shortlisted for awards, I’d have to say that I’m generally in favour of them. Sales aside, it’s nice to know that people thought well enough of your work to want to mark it as worthy in some way. It’s not only gratifying, it gives a new writer or editor confidence that they’re moving in the right general direction. Now the problem (or *one* problem, there are doubtless many) with the SF and Fantasy field is that it is chock full of awards for this, that and the next thing, and the methods used to determine the most worthy of the nominated works varies wildly. And this of course leads to discussion, controversy and dubiety about the relative value of each of them.

This of course is the nature of awards. No award will ever please everyone, and that’s as true of the Nobel Prize For Literature and the Man Booker as it is for any of the genre awards, but there’s been a deal of (angsty) discussion about awards this year, so clearly people aren’t content to settle on the fact that when it comes down to it an award is just a Goddam Popularity Contest. Clearly we want them to mean something.

If I had to express a preference, I’d say I’m generally more in favour of the juried awards – like the Clarke and the World Fantasy – than publicly voted ones like the Hugos. It’s not that I value the opinion of someone appointed to a jury any more than I do that of my peers, but with a jury they do make an effort to read widely across the material that has been published that year. No normal person without that obligation can hope to do that, so the publicly voted awards are limited by the relative conservatism employed in the reading choices of the voters. And doesn’t that then skew the voting in the direction of authors who are already popular?

Take this year’s BFS nomination list for Collection – not because it’s personal to me, but because it’s a good example (honest). The shortlist is very strong indeed and features writers I admire in different ways. I’ve been enjoying Joel Lane and Mike O’Driscoll since I first got into the small press in the early 90s, and Kim Newman even earlier than that when I first read Interzone, but the Newman and the Lane are both published by (very fine!) American independents (seriously check out the catalogues of Monkeybrain (bringing us the next Hal Duncan novella) and NightShade (who deserve medals galore for publishing Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen books)), and O’Driscoll’s Unbecoming and my The Ephemera are both published by the equally excellent Elastic Press. But can any of those really be expected to compete with the global appeal of Gaiman? Now, I’ve not read all of the other contenders, and I’m not even going to set one toe down the path of mental cruelty that is being objective about my own work – and I’m prepared to be surprised by the result, the BFS membership are a widely read lot after all – but it really *would* be a surprise if they’ve all gone to the trouble of amazoning off for the other books. If it doesn’t in the end come down to just being a popularity contest.

This isn’t me being bitter about my lot (It’s not FAIR! Why, oh why did I have to get shorlisted against Gaiman!!!! (and Newman, and Lane, and O’Driscoll – although personally I can’t believe Jeffrey Ford’s Empire Of Ice Cream didn’t make it too, so it could have been even tougher!). This is me leading up to something, honest.

So my complaint, generally, if I really have one, is that when it comes down to a public show of hands, the public involved could try a bit harder, get more involved, read outside of their comfort zones just a little. But say you’re Joe Blogs and you decide that to vote with a nod towards conscience in the Hugos this year you’re going to read two more novels than you normally would, but have absolutely no idea which two to choose. How do you decide?

Well, a good way is to find a recommendation site. There have over the years been a few out there that invite people to recommend books and stories that they enjoy throughout the year, and one of the best featured on Cheryl Morgan’s late and lamented Emerald City review site. Well, Cheryl clearly believes that that was a worthwhile exercise, because now she’s back with a new venture called Science Fiction Awards Watch. I believe this will quickly become the place to go to post your award recommendations and catch up on hot books you missed.

Hopefully all of the awards will benefit from more connected, more informed voters. But the real advantage is that it gives those of us who look at the great, teetering, daunting mass of reading material that is published every month a chance of not missing the gems that might otherwise pass us by.

Recommendations (1)

“Brasyl” by Ian McDonald

Following on from 2005’s superb take on India-around-the-corner, “River Of Gods”, McDonald’s take on the glorious technicolour society of Brazil is as lush as the Amazon and as slick as the 21st century TV executives featured in one of its three strands. It’s wildly imaginative and it’s filled with truth. It combines Jesuit missionaries, football, capoeira, and quantum computing into a wholly satisfying conclusion. It feels like a VR tour of the most bewildering country on the planet, and it makes you want to go there.

I knew I’d love this book, and I was right.

Not a ConReport

I’ve always thought that if you do Eastercon right you should emerge on the other side with very little you can remember to tell people about, just a sort of warm, fuzzy, drained feeling like you’ve been on a week-long stag-do with a happy-go-lucky bunch of psychic vampires. So, considering that I feel I pretty much did Eastercon (in Chester) right this year, I won’t be doing a report. I know these days people tend to blog on the spot, but c’mon for me that gets in the way of the slow and enjoyable process of Achieving Horizontal as the weekend progresses.But if you’re interested here’s what I do remember:
- I drank some beer (and a small quantity of strange Thai whisky and nasty raspberry vodka, although not at the same time)
- I ate some delicious food (particularly of the Thai variety)
- I toured the Ye Olde Disneyfest of the old town a couple of times
- I talked to many wonderful people
- and I got inspired.

This last point is very important. I usually find the interaction with other writers and the like at Eastercon an inspiring experience, a resetting of personal goals and receiving the energy to go and achieve them. Often – tired though I undoubtedly will be – I head up the road brimming with ideas and twitching to get back to the laptop. I love this aspect of it, but this year I really felt that I needed it, and am exceedingly grateful for the inspirational influx that came from talking to my agent and my friends and people I didn’t know, but do now; from seeing people I admire do well; from seeing the last copy of my collection being sold; from being asked to contribute to a forthcoming anthology; from even being asked to sign a copy of the very first anthology I was in. And if people ask why I go to Eastercon every year – even on a year like this when the event that took place was a, necessarily scaled-back and yet more expensive, replacement for the cancelled original, resulting of many familiar faces not making the trip down from Glasgow and other places – that’s why.

Thank gawd for Eastercon.

Interzone is 25

With the publication of its latest issue (in the shops now!), Interzone magazine is officially 25 years old. I’ve been reading it for at least 80% of that time and over the years it has introduced me to an uncountable list of fantastic writers that have enriched my life. I’ve eulogised about the mag before, and there’s no need to do so again in detail, but:

1/ Interzone started me writing (and has yet to find a way of stopping me).
2/ Interzone has for a long time now been the keystone of British genre fiction; its editors have an unerring eye for new talent that quickly become household names.
3/ Interzone 209 (out now! buy it!) features an interview between myself and Mr Duncan, plus a new Book Of All Hours story by Mr Duncan, PLUS new stories by M John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Alastair Reynolds, Jamie Barras and Daniel Kaysen.

How is it possible you’ve finished reading this and not gone out and bought the thing, or better still ordered a subscription!