Update: Posted Books & Writing

Nice to see that the books I’ve been posting off are arriving safely:

It’s also nice to see the shelves up in my loft steadily emptying. Those books weren’t doing anyone any good sitting up there. Hopefully I’ll get to the stage where I’m only sending off new books. However, I still have plenty of foreign editions I’ve no idea what the hell to do with. Many German readers out there? Because I’ve got a couple of boxes of the things – can’t remember which ones they are right now. If you haven’t received your books yet I shouldn’t worry too much. I’ve never actually posted any off and have them not arrive. Also, if you’ve chosen ‘overland postage’ remember that can take as much as 6 weeks if you’re somewhere like America. If anyone wants any more they’ll find a price list further down this blog, though of course some are missing from that list. Get in contact at the email below my bio on the right here and I’ll let you know if I have what you’re after.

The writing is going well. Penny Royal I (which may be called ‘Isobel’) and II are finished to first draft while Penny Royal III is past 100,000 words. Yesterday my 2,000 words were written in the first of these. It was a sex scene. I didn’t do it for the gratuitous porn but because I’m taking more time now with character development and personal interactions. One fault to my writing is supposedly that my characters can be a bit cardboard, so I’m working on that. I’m also concentrating on more visceral/emotional reactions from my characters, more detail on aug communications and how that would change people’s behaviour, more on the nanosuites Polity citizens have running inside their bodies and how they’re used, and of course generally tightening up the plot. As I have pointed out before: the moment I think I’ve got nothing more to learn is really the moment I should quit.   

Neal Asher Video Clip 24/3/2013

Ah, got it at last after much screwing around. I warn you this is over 20 minutes of burbling...

    

Update: Okay, Laszlo has started off with a question in the comments, which is what I wanted people to do anyway. If you could all ask some more questions for the next video clip that's be great.

MORE QUESTIONS PLEASE!

Dust Jackets

We've just been having a bit of a clear-out and I found these gathering dust atop the unused cookery and reference books. (Who doesn't just print of recipes from the internet and look up stuff on google?) There are two of each.

If anyone out there has a hardback of The Departure or Zero Point with a damaged dust jacket, get in touch (my email is below my bio to the right) and I'll send you one of these. All I'll want is the cost of postage.

Reviver - Seth Patrick

One of the things I’ve been noticing over the years is how though I can read or watch and enjoy fantasy and the most outrageous science fiction (and write it) I find myself failing to suspend disbelief when it comes to supernatural stuff that hits closer to home. This is because I simply don’t believe in the soul, ghosts or an afterlife of any kind. I never have, and I guess the hardening of my attitude comes from getting older and seeing people all around me turning up their toes. Death is very final, harsh and uncompromising, which is why people like to believe it isn’t the end.

When I realized what Reviver was about I thought I would probably be abandoning it after a chapter or so. The first line grabbed me: ‘Sometimes Jonah Miller hated talking to the dead’ and the ensuing paragraph was damned good too, but I was still doubtful. However, as it progressed and I realised Jonah was ‘JP Miller duty reviver’ just doing his job at a murder scene as part of a forensic investigation I was fine with that. The combination of a hint of the supernatural with real world police investigation works, and is a good idea. It’s not a new idea since I’d come across it just a few weeks before in Eric Brown’s Necropath (much more sfnal) but it was done in a way that seems very new to me. As it progressed and filled out with the story of revival, and its real world effects, my disbelief was forcibly suspended and I settled down to enjoy a good read. I ploughed through it quickly, staying up late to finish it. What it has also done has reminded me that when I read Stephen King I was fine with the supernatural, and that maybe my aversion to it is more due to the crap TV production of the stuff and not the books. That being said, this would make a great TV series: a combination of CSI and Afterlife. I’ve since learned that it has been bought by Legendary Pictures, the company behind The Dark Knight Rises, Inception and Watchmen. Good.

Highly recommended.     

Books for Sale

Okay, I spent part of Sunday scrabbling about in my loft sorting out boxes and double-stacked shelves. I've been meaning to do this for some time because numerous copies of my books up in my loft do no one any good. Here's a list of what I have left if anyone is interested. The price will be plus postage and packing which can stack up if you're not in Britain (well, it can stack up if you are). Contact me at the email below my biography here. I also want to give a reminder to those who have contacted me about books: payment first and, if you don't get a move on, I can't guarantee that what you were after will still be available.


Update: For some reason I completely missed The Technician off this list. I have about 8 copies available.

Book	Detail	Number	Price
Gridlinked
Mass-market paperback	USA	1	£4
Hardback	USA Book club	1	£10
Brass Man
MM paperback	UK Old cover	10	£4
MM paperback	UK Sullivan cover	9	£8
Hardback	USA Book club	4	£12
Trade paperback	USA	19	£10
MM paperback	USA	19	£6
Polity Agent
MM paperback	UK Old cover	4	£4
MM paperback	UK Sullivan cover	11	£8
Line War
MM paperback	UK old cover	4	£4
Prador Moon
MM paperback	UK old cover	2	£4
Hardback	UK old cover	2	£15
Trade paperback	US Night Shade Books issue	24	£10
Voyage of the Sable Keech
MM paperback	UK old cover	7	£4
MM paperback	UK Sullivan cover	10	£8
Orbus
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	6	£8
Cowl
MM paperback	UK wraparound	4	£8
MM paperback	US	7	£5.50
Trade paperback	US	9	£10
Hilldiggers
MM paperback	UK old cover	8	£4
Shadow of the Scorpion
Trade paperback	UK old cover	5	£12
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	11	£8
The Gabble
MM paperback	UK old cover	11	£8
The Departure
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	11	£8
Hardback	UK Sullivan	1	£18
Zero Point
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	13	£8

New Books!

This is what happens when I'm let loose in Waterstones with a gift card. The card was for £30 and I ended up spending £49. Ah well, in terms of the hours of pleasure I will hopefully find here it's not much to pay. So, after I've finished the one I'm reading now (Reviver by Seth Patrick) which one of these do you think I should read next?

On Writing - Writer's Group

I got an invite to a local writer’s group a few weeks back and, since it was local, in fact in a pub I used to frequent over many years, I thought, ‘why not?’ though I added the proviso that I’d just go along for a chat and wouldn’t be giving a talk or reading. It all seemed to go pretty well and hopefully I said some stuff they found interesting. I also took along some professionally edited sheets from Zero Point for them to have a look at – the kind of stuff I would have killed for many years ago. Interestingly, they had a session of writing, whereby someone provided a sentence or line and everyone keyed off that for ten minutes. A sheet of paper was pushed my way and I considered running at that point, but then I told myself not to be such a wimp.

The line was, ‘I never suffer from writer’s block, but…’ and here’s my contribution:

I never suffer from writer’s block but, when asked by this writer’s group to produce, on the spot, I felt my sphincter tightening to the diameter of a needle’s eye. However, not to be beaten, I’ll waffle on about anything relevant. Too many years ago to count I wrote an article called ‘Beating the Block’. This concerned stream-of-consciousness writing, whereby you write just anything as it comes into your head. You don’t agonize over how much sense it makes or how correct is your English. You just write. The tangled bats were falling from the sky and forming drifts beside the sapphire roads etc. Ad nauseum. Eventually some sort of sense might arise out of this but it doesn’t matter – you’re no longer staring at a blank page. Moving on… One of the biggest causes of writer’s block is the angst about what to write and how to write, which in a way is daft with the editing tools now available. It’s not as if we’re working straight to a typewriter. Typex is no longer required. We have find-and-replace and in the end the ‘delete’ button is always available.  

This is as it came and certainly, as I just typed it here, I had to resist the urge to edit. I’d perhaps use ‘size of a needle’s eye’, since a needle’s eye isn’t circular. I’d add more about what you ignore when doing a stream-of-consciousness piece and I would have done a longer piece. I would have added more about the fear of getting it wrong being the cause of writer’s block and more about why that’s irrelevant now and, in fact, always has been irrelevant. Editing, even before we began working on computers, included a waste paper bin.

Anyway, this seems a good exercise to try if you have your own writer’s group, and in fact it might be something worth trying by yourself. Ask someone else to provide that line, or maybe even pick it at random from a book, and just write for ten minutes. Maybe those of you over here on the forum – the writer’s workshop – could try something?     

The Departure Review

Nice review of The Departure here on David Agranoff’s site.

I was particularly struck by how reasonable these paragraphs are:

The majority of Science Fiction novels with a political message are written by left leanings writers (like John Shirley, John Brunner or Kim Stanley Robinson) or straight-up radicals (like Ursala K.Leguin and Norman Spinrad). I would be lying if I didn't admit that I like to agree with my favorite novels. However as a political writer myself I don't want or expect all my readers to agree with me. So in return it is only fair that I read enjoy authors I don't agree with.

That is the thing, this novel feels very Ayn Rand influenced and seems to call for little or no government. Probably the opposite of John Shirley's recent anti-libertarian novel “Everything is Broken.” I don't really agree with a lot of the message but I enjoyed the story throughout.

Now why is it that a minority of reviewers are so obviously vitriolic about my stuff because they disagree with me politically? The prevailing meme among them seems to be: his political outlook is wrong wrong wrong, therefore he is a bad writer. Perhaps they can’t stomach the fact that I keep selling books? And why is it, I wonder, that the reverse doesn’t apply? I don’t often see reviewers objecting to a writer’s work because that writer is left-wing. And, frankly, if I objected to novels on the basis of the writer’s politics I would have missed out on a vast number of excellent books. It is sad.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken 

Video Clip

As many of you may know I have done a few video clips in which I answer fan questions. Here's the last one I did, last year. Yes, that ugly bugger is me.

Now, being a glutton for punishment. How about some questions for a new clip, or more? Post them in the comments section.  

Anti-Ageing Breakthrough

Well, I didn’t see this is one coming, and really should have. I’ve always felt that life-extension would go in a series of small steps, just as it has been going. There is no cure for cancer as a whole because there are thousands of different varieties of cancer. If a cure or some kind of delaying treatment is found for one kind then that pushes overall life-expectancy up, just a little. Just as if a better way of treating dementia or diabetes is found. Statisticians have a lot of fun with these figures because, with life presently being 100% fatal, if you cure one thing then more people die of another. Next time you hear ‘dementia on the rise’ just remember that is probably because less people are keeling over from heart attacks.

Since 1970 life expectancy in Western European countries has typically risen by six to eight years, and the rate of increase has been 2% a decade. Of course these figures vary hugely across the world and are dependent on numerous factors, but the trend is ever upwards. There are many coffin dodgers would like to try and stay within that slow rise and, unless our civilization collapses, there will be people born in the next 100 years who are just going to keep on living, with no end in sight.

However, even though most of the low-hanging fruit have been picked – consider how much life expectancy must have leapt up when penicillin was discovered – but the possibility of big jumps in life expectancy should not be discounted. And this looks like it might be one of them. Here is a link at Extreme Longevity, and another at Science Daily and lots more can be found if you just google ‘Anti-aging drug breakthrough’.

Publishing his work in the prestigious journal Science, David Sinclair of Harvard reports a breakthrough in the development of drugs that can block the aging process.

The article is entitled Evidence for a Common Mechanism of SIRT1 Regulation by Allosteric Activators, and reveals how interaction with a single amino acid in the SIRT1 enzyme is crucial for the ability of drugs that can activate the enzyme.

SIRT1 is an enzyme in the class of molecules called Sirtuins. Significant research shows that activation of sirtuins  reduces cellular aging through its interaction with other cellular master switches such as FOXO3a and PGC-1a

“At the cellular level,” explain the authors. “SIRT1 controls DNA repair and apoptosis, circadian clocks, inflammatory pathways, insulin secretion, and mitochondrial biogenesis”

The increase in centenarians is well known, but this particular comment caught my attention:

 “Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy. Things there are also looking promising,” he says. ”We’re finding that ageing isn’t the irreversible affliction that we thought it was,”

“Some of us could live to 150, but we won’t get there without more research,” he adds.