Pulgasari

Across the Thames to Borough High Street and the Roxy Bar and Screen for a showing of North Korean monster movie Pulgasari. It's by no means a good film, but it's important and interesting because it's a rare glimpse into the mindset of the famously secretive Last True Communist State™, and because one of its directors, Shin Sang-ok, was kidnapped from South Korea on the orders of Kim Jong-il, then heir presumptive of supreme leader Kim Il-sung, in 1978.

The story is as simple as a fairytale, a kind of amalgam of Godzilla, Seven Samurai and Sparticus, filmed in the style of lowest-common-denominator Hong Kong Chop Socky movies. The land is oppressed by decadent rulers who confiscate the peasants' tools and cooking bowls so that they can be melted down and turned into weapons. The eldest son of a blacksmith plans to join the rebels; when his father refuses to cooperate with the authorities and is arrested, the son attempts to intervene and is likewise thrown in jail. The dying father creates a doll, Pulgasari, out of rice grains and infuses it with his dying breath; later it comes to life when a drop of his daughter's blood touches it, and starts to eat iron, and starts to grow. Pulgasari rescues the blacksmith's son from execution, the son leads a revolution that, aided by the now gigantic monster, overthrows the king and his armies. But the victorious peasants must now feed the ever-hungry Pulgasari with every scrap of metal they possess; they're no better off than before. Only when the blacksmith's daughter sacrifices herself to the monster's appetite is its rampage finally ended.

Although the monster-in-a-suit was masterminded by Japan's Toho studios (Pulgasari is played by the same actor who played Godzilla in the leaping lizard's 1980s incarnations) some of the special effects are crude, to western eyes the acting is melodramatically overwrought, concentrating on big, simple emotional gestures, and the cutting is either erratically abrupt or the print I saw has been sliced down from a much longer film. Yet Pulgasari also possesses a kind of innocent charm, with the best beard-stroking villains I've seen in a long while, some terrifically detailed sets for the monster to wreck, and the kind of epic battlescenes that are possible only when the director has an entire army at his disposal and doesn't seem to have much care for the safety of his extras. But despite the simplicity of its story and message - war is a Bad Thing, mmkaay? - Pulgasari is also a weirdly ambiguous film. Perhaps it is no more than crude propaganda intended to show how the warmongering West was oppressing its population and threatening the entire world with endless war involving horrific superweapons - like Godzilla, Pulgasari is clearly a metaphor for the atomic bomb. If so, the militarised state of North Korea is just as guilty, and scenes of starving peasants butchering a horse for real and eating tree bark echo actual famines suffered by its population. Did the film's state producers fail to see these parallels, or did they know exactly what they were doing but thought that the film's audience would accept the propaganda (if that's what it is) at face value? Or did its kidnapped director manage to pull off a sly coup de theatre mocking his captors? Impossible to tell.

Later, waiting for the bus outside London Bridge Station, with the Shard leaning into the winter night. What would alien eyes make of that? A monument to Western ambition and power, or a signifier of the failed dreams of the never-ending rise in profit touted by the propagandists of late-stage capitalism?

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 12

You can now read chapter 12 of In The Mouth of the Whale at the web site. Or begin at the beginning.

It brings us up to the end of the first part of the novel, and will be the last I'll post for a while. Meanwhile, I have another novel to finish, and I'm getting to grips with the requirements for publishing ebooks on platforms other than Kindle . . .

In other news, I'll be at the SFX Weekender at the beginning of next month, and the British National SF Convention, Eastercon, at, er, Easter.

Listening to: 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' Richard and Linda Thompson
Reading: Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog
Writing: Revising a short story

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 11

Chapter 11 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now up on the web site. Chapter 1 is over here. And you can now preorder the Kindle edition for the price of a paperback (also available for preorder on iTunes).

Currently listening to: 'Down on Penny's Farm' The Bently Boys
Currently reading: Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway
Currently writing: see Red Ink

Red Ink

As publication of In The Mouth Of The Whale inches closer, I'm working on what I hope is the penultimate draft of the next novel, Evening's Empires. My first short stories and my first novel were composed entirely on a typewriter; while I confess to a certain minor nostalgia for the only forward method typewriters imposed on you, I don't miss interleaving bond, carbon and bank (onionskin) papers, necessary to get a duplicate copy in a time when photocopies were scarce and expensive, and I was never a big fan of Tipp-ex and other correction fluids, or retyping a page if it contained more than three errors in it. I was an early adopter of word-processing and love its fluidity of composition, but I still maintain one tradition from the old keys-on-ink-ribbon-on-paper days: I still print out at least one draft of whatever I'm working on, and go over it with a  red pen in hand.

Which is what I'm doing right now. Because I have the idea, never tested, that it is easier to spot goofs on the printed page rather than on the screen, I prefer to annotate hard copy than make electronic notes. (Has anyone ever done a serious study of this? If not, surely it wouldn't be too hard to set up a randomised experiment where, say,  half the test subjects proof-read a text on screen and the other half proof-read it on paper, and then swapped from screen to paper and vice versa and corrected another text.) Some of my corrections are of punctuation and spelling; others highlight instances of repetition, correct factual errors, or change the order of a sentence to eliminate ambiguity. But the most important changes are the notes to myself about glitches in plot, action, and character. Some are terse; others spill all the way down the page, or are linked by looping arrows to paragraphs at the top or bottom of the page; really serious second thoughts are continued on the blank side of the page, with the command OVER written in the margin and underscored two or three times so I don't miss the annotations when I start over, and begin to make changes on screen. At this point, I'm the first person to read through the entire novel; I realise that I've become kin to the kind of creature who annotates library books with scornful exclamation marks and sarcastic underlinings.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of In The Mouth Of The Whale has been posted on the web site. If you want to start from the beginning, it's this way.

In other news, my short story 'Gene Wars' is featured in the January edition of Lightspeed magazine. [Edit: you can now read the story for free. And there's a brief interview with me, too, conducted by Andrew Liptak.]

Currently listening to: 'I Don't Get it', Cowboy Junkies
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
Currently writing: Hacking away the excess from the ante-penultimate draft of Evening's Empires.

Interstellar Travel

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food

and little dishes, and all accoutrements

fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies

and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul

in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith

with its store of food and little cooking pans

and change of clothes,

upon the flood's black waste

upon the waters of the end

upon the sea of death, where still we sail

darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

Discovering this fragment of D.H. Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death' in Grayson Perry's The Tomb Of The Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum reminded me of the importance of the metaphorical power of science fiction. Something so often forgotten, these days, when too often it's mistaken for a literal report on the future.

The Excitement Of The Found Image

Why even hard science fiction shouldn't be considered to be in any way a facsimile of the scientific method:
In just three sentences, M. John Harrison nails what science fiction is really all about.

Just Received

The author's copies of In the Mouth of The Whale. Always strange and exciting to hold in your hands proof that something that started out in your head has become a mass-produced object, out there in the world. I like the cover even more now I realise that there's an image on the back, too. Sidonie Beresford-Browne, who also did the covers for The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, has done a great job.

Fragment From A Work In Progress

‘Let me tell you about a dream I had when I was about your age. I dreamed that I had entered a great white city, and I knew, in the dream, that I had also travelled into the future, although I cannot tell you how I knew. Perhaps because such cities were sometimes represented in popular fiction about the future, although the one into which I walked in my dream was much more detailed than any picture of imaginary cities. There were many tall buildings, all built of white stone and fretted with row upon row of windows. Some cylindrical and buttressed with fins, like the dreams of the first spaceships before the first spaceships were built. Some narrow rectangles. Some square in profile. Some tapering to points. Clad in differently textured and decorated stone, but all white in the bland sunlight. They stood in clusters and at their feet were smaller buildings. All again built of white stone.  Elevated roadways and monorail lines ran past the buildings or looped around them at different levels. There were open spaces, but they contained only white gravel and stone fountains, and statues of people in heroic and noble poses. No trees, no growing things of any kind, and no decoration or signs. In the time when I lived, cities were full of signs advertising all kinds of goods and services. Here, the buildings were blank canvases and the everyday life of the city was unreadable.

'In some dreams, you are a bodiless viewpoint able to transition from one place to another. People in the dream talk with you as if you were one of them, but you have no sense of your body. You are an observer. That was not the case in this dream. I was aware of every footstep, and the people who inhabited the city looked at me as I passed. Perhaps because I was dressed as I would be dressed in waking life, which to them must have seemed as strange and antique as a man in a suit of armour walking up Broadway. The citizens of the city were men and women who were each different and each similar, in the way of members of the same family look alike. They had brown skin and black hair cut short in various styles, and wore long shirts over loose trousers in combinations of pastel colours. There were no children. In my day birds nested on ledges of buildings as if on cliffs, and people kept certain kinds of animals as pets. There were no animals that I could see. Only adults of varying ages. There were many of them, but the walkways and monorail trains were not crowded because the city was so large.

‘I wandered a long time, but did not dare to enter any building. At last, with shadows engulfing the feet of the tall buildings and reddened sunlight burning on their western faces, at the foot of a huge statue of a bare-breasted woman holding up a strand of DNA to the blank dish of her face (none of the statues had features), one of the inhabitants came up to me, and asked me if I was a traveller. I told him that I was dreaming. Often we do not know in dreams that we are dreaming, but I knew. I also told him that I believed that I was dreaming about the future. He looked at me quizzically, and said that although this was his present, it was not necessarily my future. He said that I might reach it, but there were other paths I might take.’

'Satisfied' - Tom Waits

'Video Games' - Lana Del Rey

'Field Song' - William Elliot Whitmore

'The Way It Goes' - Gillian Welch

'Quail and Dumplings' - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

That Was The Year That Was

In 2011 I finished one novel, In The Mouth of The Whale, and got a good chunk of writing done on the next, Evening's Empires. I published a novella, 'The Choice', in Asimov's SF and wrote two short stories. One, 'Bruce Springsteen', appeared in the January 2012 edition of Asimov's; the other is for the second volume of Stephen Jones' Zombie Apocalypse series, out sometime in 2012 I believe. Five novels were reissued as ebooks by Gollancz (they went live in January, a bit later than planned, so I'm counting them here). One, Four Hundred Billion Stars, my first, was written on a typewriter. The others are Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland. Like many genre authors, I have a big back catalogue of stories, and this year I experimented with releasing a few of them as ebooks. First up was a novella, City of the Dead, followed by the reissue of a short-story collection, Little Machines, previously available only as a limited edition hardback, and then a collection of five stories sharing the same future history, Stories From the Quiet War. Conclusions so far: it's better for authors to release stories in small, cheap collections or as singletons, rather than book-length collections. As usual, the feeling that I should write more (the usual freelancer terror of not being productive enough) is counterbalanced by the conviction that I must write better.

I didn't read much new fiction this year - too busy writing it. discovery of the year was Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers, a wonderfully deadpan black comedy set in Goldrush California. I thought the first half of China Mieville's Embassytown, an SF fable about the cage of language, was one of the strongest and strangest depictions of the alien I've read for some time. In Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie the past is an alien planet; the description of the hunting and capture of a Komodo dragon is as densely weird as any interplanetary expedition. Christopher Priest's The Islanders revisits the world of his Dream Archipelago, and within its tour guide format the fragments of several stories twine and merge: one I need to reread. I'm a big fan of Don DeLillo, so snapped up The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories as soon as it came out; from the tropical inertia of 'Creation' to the desperate obsession of 'The Starveling',  DeLillo's Martian gaze perfectly captures fragments of human foolishness in the amber of  recent history.

In non-fiction, James Gleick's The Information is a marvellous and lucid history of how we preserve and use the stuff we know, and how if shapes our lives. Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality is an equally lucid exploration of the current theories of multiverses. Gordon Matthews' The Ghetto at the Center of the World may be confined to a single building in Hong Kong, but his stories of a microcosm of globalisation reflect the huge currents in capitalism that affect every part of the world. Just over a hundred years ago, Amundsen's expedition reached the south pole; geologist Edmund Stump's The Roof at the Bottom of the World weaves personal stories of rockhunting in Antarctica with a history of Antarctic exploration, and is packed with jaw-dropping photographs of the continent's austere beauty. There are more great photographs in Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, a memorial of the architecture of the Communist equivalent of the Gernsback continuum, and a way of life and thought now all but extinct, here in the twenty-first century.

God's Own Christmas Ornament

In what is one of the best images ever taken by the Cassini spacecraft, Titan and Dione hang in front of Saturn's rings. Like Earth, Saturn has seasons caused by the tilt in its axis. It's presently spring, in Saturn's northern hemisphere. The sun is behind and above the viewpoint, and the shadows of the rings are cast across the southern hemisphere.

The image is in true colour, by the way, so it is exactly what you would see if you were floating in the observation cupola of a clipper outward bound from Rhea en route to Jupiter.

Night Movies

On the night of the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice, nine of my favourite films in which the story takes place over a single night. What did I miss?

The Thing 1982 dir John Carpenter
The crew of an isolated Antarctic base are infiltrated by a shape-changing alien. Unable to trust each other, they're picked off one by one as they try to stop the alien escaping. Yes, I know it begins in daylight, but the action really starts, with eye-popping SFX by Rob Bottin, as the stormy Antarctic night falls.
Best moment: Touched by a hot needle, self-aware alien blood leaps out of a petri dish.

Into The Night 1985 dir. John Landis
Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) has a dull job, an unfaithful wife, and can't sleep. When he accidently saves Diana (Michelle Pfieffer) from Iranian thugs in an LAX parking structure, he becomes embroiled in a plot involving smuggled jewels. David Bowie appears as a private detective who mistakes Ed for a veteran player.
Best moment: Stunned by narcolepsy, Ed watches an entire Cal Worthington commercial.

Night On Earth 1991 dir Jim Jarmusch
One night, five cities, five cab drivers and their fares, and a Tom Waits' soundtrack.
Best moment: Cabbie Corky (Winona Ryder) turns down casting director Gena Rowlands' offer of a part in a movie. She'd rather be a mechanic.

The Warriors 1979 dir Walter Hill
Framed for a murder that threatens to trigger gang warfare, a small but resourceful gang, the Warriors, must cross hostile territories in New York to reach a midnight summit, their only chance to prove their innocence. A great action film from great action film director Hill, set in tough old New York. With a story loosely based on Xenophon's 'Anabasis'.
Best moment: Warrior's leader Swan (Michael Beck) and gang-girl Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) meet cute.

Collateral 2004 dir. Michael Mann
After cab driver Max (Jamie Fox) drops off lawyer Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) he picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a suave businessman who turns out to be a suave hitman. As the paths of his two fares intersect, Max has to work out how to save himself and the last victim on Vincent's little list.
Best moment: A coyote crosses the path of Max's cab, on an LA street turned into a ghost of itself by halogen streetlights.

Die Hard 1988 dir. John McTierman
When New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) turns up at his wife's office Christmas party, he becomes the only man who can stop a terrorist plot. You know the rest. There's a famous scriptwriting class that uses Casablanca as an exemplar. If you want to write a script without a superfluous scene or line, study Jeb Stuart and Stephen E de Souza's adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel.
Best thing in the movie: Bruce's vest.

Night of the Living Dead 1968 dir George Romero
A mixed bunch of people hide out from flesh-eating zombies in a remote farmhouse. Things don't go too well. Shot on a shoestring budget, it set the template for zombie and spam-in-a-cabin horror films every since. Has one of the bleakest endings of any film.
Best moment: Involves a little girl, her father, her mother, and a basement.

After Hours 1985 dir. Martin Scorsese.
Word-processing drone Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is plunged into a nocturnal Kafkaesque nightmare when he ventures into Manhattan's Soho to meet a girl he picked up in a coffee shop.
Best moment: Paul is turned into a living statue, to hide him from a vengeful mob.

It's A Wonderful Life 1946 dir. Frank Capra
On the worst night in the life of small town businessman George Bailey (James Stewart), apprentice angel Clarence (Henry Travers) demonstrates the worth of a life he thinks a claustrophobic dead end by showing what things would be like if he'd never been born. Key moments in his life are shown in flashback, so I think it counts. And the night in question is Christams Eve, so hey. In his novel, Suspects, film critic David Thomson sets It's A Wonderful Life at the root of American noir. He has a point.
Best moment: Cornered by cops on the bridge where Clarence forestalled his suicide attempt, a humbled George Bailey asks for his life back. And snow starts falling around him like a blessing.

The Dead Hand Of The Past

Outside the office window, a funeral cortege clip-clops past, headed by a carriage drawn by two black horses with black plumes affixed to their heads, drawing an open carriage in which the coffin lies inside a glass bier. Like the last resting place of Snow White. As William Faulkner once said, the past isn't dead; it isn't even past. Always useful for a science-fiction writer to be reminded of that.

Working on a short story. After finishing a draft, I realised that it had been so laborious because it started in the wrong place. Which is why it was mostly back-story instead of narrative. You'd think, after writing some eighty-odd short stories I'd know by now where one wanted to begin.

Lauren Beukes has assembled a reading gift guide from the recommendations of many of her interesting friends. I was very pleased to be able to recommend this wonderful collection of photographs. More here, and here.

It may be cheeky of me to recommend one of my own books, but why not try this e-book collection, at a suitably cheeky price?

A Haunting We Will Go

So I met up with indefatigable editor Stephen Jones and several other local bookish characters for pre-Christmas drinks, and he pressed into my hand a volume of one of his latest books, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, an anthology of new and reprinted ghost stories. It features numerous luminaries of the horror field, including Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Michael Marshal Smith, Lisa Tuttle, and also includes a rewritten version of one of my early short stories, 'Inheritance' - my ninth published story, in fact, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1988. I'm best known for my science fiction, but I've been a fan of horror stories from way back, turned on by Universal and Hammer films, the Mayflower horror anthologies, the Pan Books of Horror Stories, and the stories of M.R. James. On Christmas Eve in 1968, while the rest of the family were at Midnight Mass, I was frightened half to death by Jonathan Miller's famous TV adaptation of James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad'.  Lonely beaches never seemed the same afterwards. And now one of my stories is between the same covers as one of the master's, 'A Warning to the Curious'. How cool.

Also cool - my novella, 'The Choice' has been selected by Rich Horton for his Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 Edition. Table of contents here.

Don't Call Me Sherly

Long ago, during a class that introduced me and a bunch of my 11-year-old peers to the school library (where I soon discovered a complete set of H.G. Wells' work, but that's another story), our English teacher asked a question: 'Where does Sherlock Holmes live?' My hand wasn't the only one to shoot up, and I forget who gave the correct answer. But I do remember that as far as our teacher was concerned it was the wrong answer. 'You see, boys, Sherlock Holmes was never alive. So he could not have lived anywhere.' I've never forgiven him for trying to turn the treasure house of the library into a mausoleum.

He picked on Sherlock Holmes because Holmes is one of the most famous fictional characters in fiction, who had one of the most famous addresses in literature: one of us was bound to know the answer (you know it, of course). Sherlock Holmes is so famous that you don't have to have read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories, or to have seen any of the numerous films in which Holmes has appeared (more than any other fictional character), to know several singular facts about him. I first encountered him in an anthology of the original stories, in a limp-covered volume dating from the 1920s; I've just encountered him again in a preview of his latest film incarnation, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Oh dear.

It's the sequel to director Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes film, which turned Holmes into an action hero in a lightly steam-punked Victorian London, and featured rapid-fire comic banter between Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and Watson (Jude Law) and elaborate bullet- and explosion-ridden set pieces punctuated by sequences of slow motion, time-slicing, and other techniques Ritchie previously deployed on his gangster films. I thought it was rather good fun.  Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is more of the same, but ups the stakes by introducing Holmes' nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), whose fiendish plans soon puts a crimp in Doctor Watson's honeymoon.

The plot is very loosely based on 'The Final Problem', the story in which Conan Doyle tried to kill off his most famous creation. It kicks off with an explosion in Strasbourg and an encounter between Holmes, Irene Adler, the femme fatale who helped him in his previous adventure, and a fistful of goons, and barely pauses for breath in a headlong dash that involves gypsies, anarchists, a chase across Europe, and diplomatic skulduggery. It's not a bad film, as noisy spectacles go. Its varied locations are packed with period detail, Downey turns in another fine comic performance, Law's Watson is an able foil to Holmes' quick-fire eccentricities, and the postmortem reveals of how the great detective foresaw and confounded the knavish tricks of his enemies are as clever as in the first film.

But it isn't as good as its predecessor, doesn't add anything new to the canon, and it doesn't quite know what to do with most of the supporting characters. Although Mycroft Holmes is drolly played by Stephen Fry, the script doesn't do much to show that he's Holmes' smarter, older brother, except to call him Sherly. I would have liked to have seen more of Simza Heron (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the original Dragon Tattoo trilogy), the gypsy whose brother has been caught up in Moriarty's plans. Rapace's performance is lit by smouldering intelligence, but like the other women in the film she takes second place to the bromance between Holmes and Watson, whose sparring banter is sharp and lively at its best, and as camp as a pantomine dame at its worst (the film's humour is laid on with a broad brush: the only thing funnier than a man in a dress is a middle-aged man clad only in his dignity).


The film's big problem is that in hindsight, once the dazzle and noise of the action sequences has died down, the logic of its narrative falls apart. To be fair, it's a problem common to most action films, and to quite a few genre novels, too (writers: if you rely on big set pieces to keep the narrative flowing, you're in trouble - especially if your biggest and noisiest set piece takes place in the middle of the story rather than towards the end). More fatally, for this particular action film, the menace and significance of its villain diminishes as the film progresses, and Moriarty's fiendish plan is the stuff of a thousand action movies in which the villain promotes war for fun and/or profit - Mission Impossible IV uses the same old tired trope. Here's a bit of useful advice for budding evil masterminds: if your brilliant scheme involves starting a war somewhere, it probably isn't that brilliant, and will inevitably be thwarted at the last moment. Throw a couple of henchmen in the shark pool, relax with a martini salted with orphans' tears, and think of something else.

In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available on the web site. Haven't started yet? Here's Chapter 1.

This is the last chapter I'll post this side of the New Year. I'll put up three more early in January, taking us to the end of the first part of the novel.

Currently listening to: 'Don't Grieve After Me', Ernest Phelps
Currently reading: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Currently writing: a short story, very slowly

Through The Past, Darkly

When it grows dark, as it does early in the afternoon, now, the details of the slice of London visible through the window of my office diminish to the spur of a cul-de-sac and a shadowy rise of land flecked with lights, and I'm reminded of looking out of the window of the attic bedroom I once shared with my brother. When I was a teenager and it became too noisy, downstairs, I would retreat to the attic and work on some piece of tyro fiction (all long lost, like the cottage), pecking at a typewriter perched on a scrap of wood laid across my knees, my shins burning in front of the one-bar electric fire, my fingers freezing.

There wasn't a house directly opposite, as there is now, but there was a warehouse looming at the far left-hand edge of the gardens shared by the four cottages of which ours was the third, and there was a railway beyond, as there is here, although the railway of the lost past was not in a cutting but was somewhat elevated, a branch-line station closed just a few years before. And then the breast of the steep slope up towards Selsley village, whose lights twinkled in the night just as the lights of Highgate twinkle now, just a handful, mostly hidden by winter-bare trees.

I finished a draft of the next novel a couple of weeks ago and will return to it at the beginning of the New Year, knowing at last the shape its narrative makes from beginning to end. I was thinking about a couple of short stories - the one I should write, the one that wants to be written right away - when the past ambushed me. I've been living here ten years, and it has only just occurred to me how familiar the view is, on a winter's night.

Like In the Mouth of the Whale, the new novel shares the same future history of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and is set some 1500 years after the events in those two novels. But while In the Mouth of the Whale is set in the atmosphere of a gas giant and in an archipelago of worldlets orbiting Fomalhaut, the new novel starts some fifty years later, in the asteroid belt of the Solar System. And although its story riffs off an event foreshadowed at the end of In the Mouth of the Whale, you don't need to have read one to enjoy the other, much as you don't need to have read the first two novels to enjoy In the Mouth of the Whale. It's called Evening's Empires, by the way. Among other things, it's about the persistence of the past.

In The Mouth Of The Whale - Chapter 8

You can now read Chapter 8 of my forthcoming novel In The Mouth Of The Whale, over at the blog. Or you can start from the beginning.

Currently listening to: James McMurtry, 'See The Elephant'
Currently reading: Ghetto at the Center of the World, Gordon Mathews
Currently writing: I'm taking a short break...

More Ebookery - Special Promotional Prices

I'm pleased to announce that I have published a new e-book. Stories From The Quiet War is a collection of five 'Quiet War' stories, including a previously unpublished novella, available only as an e-publication at the special price of just £0.86, or $1.34. I've also lowered the price of my short story collection, Little Machines, to just £1.71, or $2.67. Prices are good until January 19th 2011, the publication date of In The Mouth Of The Whale. The cover of Stories From The Quiet War is, like those of my other two e-books, by the multi-talented Michael Marshall Smith.

Introduction To Stories From The Quiet War

One of the stories collected [in Stories From The Quiet War], ‘Second Skin’, was the first short story I wrote in what would become the Quiet War sequence. Written way back in 1996 and published a year later, it contains several of the signature tropes of the sequence – the setting on an obscure little moon of one of the outer planets in the aftermath of a war between Earth and outer system colonists, vacuum organisms, the pursuit of the gene wizard Avernus, weaponised biotech, huge construction projects built by robots, and so on.

In the stories, the war was pretty conventional, triggered by a failed attempt by colonists to free themselves from the control of powerful interests on Earth. The novels reworked that history, turning the ancestors of the inhabitants of the outer system into refugees whose growing ambitions to spread out through the Solar System and push human evolution forward threatened a fragile peace between themselves and the political powers on Earth. But the novels shared with the short stories my interest in how the large movements of history affect the lives of those caught up in them (and vice versa), and my fascination with the fantastically varied landscapes of the moons of the outer planets. That fascination was first sparked by the images captured by Pioneer 11 and the two Viking spacecraft as they sped through the systems of the outer planets. Here were sulphur volcanoes, icy landscapes cratered by ancient bombardments, a moon with bright and dark hemispheres, a moon whose jigsaw surface might hide a vast ocean of liquid water, shepherd moons embedded within a vast ring system, and so on, and so on. The kind of exoticism that science-fiction writers traditionally mapped on to planets of far stars, right on our doorstep. The Galileo and Cassini-Huygens spacecraft sharpened those images and revealed fresh wonders – the geysers of little Enceladus, the rivers and lakes of Titan. Here were real places, named, mapped in detail. All I had to do was insert figures in those landscapes. But how did they live there? How did living there affect them? What were their dreams, their ambitions?

I wrote nine ‘Quiet War’ stories over a period of about ten years, extending the history of the war, and exploring various locations on and inside the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually took the plunge and wrote a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.The first was about the causes of the war and the long build-up to final act of violence; the second was about the consequences of the war for both victors and vanquished. Gardens of the Sun, set like the stories in the aftermath of the war, borrowed from several of them heavily modified settings and characters. The four stories republished here weren’t reworked into Gardens of the Sun, but the previously unpublished story, ‘Karyl’s War’, is a modification of an unused opening sequence of the novel and, like the novel, it contains rewritten passages from an earlier story (‘The Passenger’). It was intended to give a new perspective on the quick and violent conclusion to the long game of the Quiet War, but in the end I didn’t use it because I decided that I didn’t need to introduce a new character; the five main characters of The Quiet War were perfectly able to carry the various strands of the narrative forward. The Quiet War sequence has now been extended 1500 years into its future. A new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, is a self-contained story set at the edge of the dust ring around the star Fomalhaut, where one of the characters from The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun arrives in the middle of a war over control of the star’s single gas giant planet. There’s a big dumb object floating in atmosphere of that gas giant, probing for signs of life. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of an ancient cult. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution, and an exploration of the costs of longevity . . .

‘Second Skin’ and the other stories collected here are where all this began. The first steps on a long exploration of strange worlds, and the people who live there.