Ryan Britt Interview

This one was done in 2015 and I think for Barnes & Noble:

Interview question Neal Asher

(Interview by Ryan Britt)

*You’ve been described as a military science fiction writer, even though your various novels seem to be so much more. Are you comfortable with this label? What makes good military science fiction?

No it’s not a label I am comfortable with because it feels too narrow. I do like my battles but I also like building ecologies, creating monsters of every stripe including the human kind, exploring the consequences of technology like mind recording, taking a close look at what immortality might mean and much other stuff besides. I’ve read fiction that does fall squarely under that label and always felt there to be large elements missing from its depiction of the future. Often aspects of what the future might hold are neglected: how humans and their society might have changed, the new weapons and their effect on tactics (often I’ve read fiction where the battles are just the past supplanted into the future and upgraded with lasers) – the thinking needs to be wider. Good military fiction would logically be the kind that does not neglect these.

*Funnily, you’re also claimed by the cyberpunk subgenre. Your Wikipedia page even calls you “post-cyberpunk.” Other than your books, what’s your favorite cyberpunk thing ever?

I’m not even sure what the label means – in fact I’ll have to go look it up – and don’t pseuds just love using sticking that word ‘post’ on things? Well … judging by ‘high tech and low life, post-industrial cultures, megacorporations etc’ I’d say that my fiction has elements of these. But it’s just another narrow label used by those who like to discuss SF and makes me tired just thinking about it. I guess, if we want to go there, my favourite cyberpunk thing would be Blade Runner.  

*Your Polity universe is interesting for a lot of reasons, but partly because it spans the majority of your various works. This reminds me a little of C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books, or the sprawling “future history” of Asimov. What are the challenges in this kind of vast mutli-book world building? Or in other words, do you sometimes fantasize about ditching all this and writing a new novel set in a totally different continuity?

The biggest challenge I guess is continuity errors. The more I write set in the Polity the more I have to check in previous books. There are the simple things like what is the colour of prador blood, then there’s the more difficult stuff like what technologies are extant, especially when my Polity stories span a thousand years. Actually I haven’t fantasized about writing novels set in a new continuity but done so. The Owner trilogy is not set in the Polity. The reason I wrote that is because if you write in one setting, no matter how wide, you can become stale. The danger of course is that when you step out of that setting the fans can pillory you for it. But I’ll never ditch the Polity because there’s still a lot of fun to be had there. I stepped out of it for a while with the Owner then came back to it refreshed with the Transformation books. 

*You concluded the “Owner” series not too long ago and now the “Transformation” series has started. For fans of your books, what’s tonally different for this series versus the previous? Are we dealing with a Revolver/Rubber Soul situation, or is this more like Magical Mystery Tour?

The Owner trilogy was my shot at thinking hard about the future and writing a dystopia, though one based on some short stories I did long ago (they appear in The Engineer ReConditioned and elsewhere). The Polity, though it can be quite rough, is a lot more optimistic and being set further into the future enters Clarke’s realm of science bordering on magic. Despite the constrictions of those continuity errors mentioned above, I can let rip in the Polity – the Owner was more constrained by being closer to the present.

*You’ve got an AI ship in Dark Intelligence—“Penny Royal”—can you talk a little about the inspiration for that?

Penny Royal first turned up as a throw-away character in a story (published in Asimov’s) called Alien Archaeology. The AI was the go-to mad scientist to get something high tech done. I brought him back in The Technician and there he grew in the telling as something enigmatic and dangerous. In a way my readers are a little bit responsible for what happened next – similar to what happened in my 5 book Cormac series. In the first book, Gridlinked, I wrote about a character called Mr Crane – a rather large android made of brass – and the readers came back at me about that saying just how much they enjoyed him. The third book of the series I wrapped around Mr Crane. It was called Brass Man. But it was also my choice because I’m a fan at heart and really enjoyed writing about Mr Crane too. In Dark Intelligence I revisited Penny Royal. My readers rather liked that creation, and I like it too. Other elements have now been incorporated, like my reading on swarm robots and ideas about distributed intelligence, and in Dark Intelligence and the ensuing books Penny Royal has grown in the telling. Hugely.

*Speaking of intelligent spaceships and connected hiveminds, what are your thoughts on Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword?

No thoughts. I haven’t read them.

*I’ve read somewhere that your patronus (from Harry Potter) would be a lobster, but what’s your favorite dinosaur?

I was going to say velociraptor because I like the name and the idea of something so vicious and fast. But the one that has stuck with me is the troodon. This is the dinosaur Dale Russell based his dinosauroid on – dinosaur man. It is also the basis of the dracomen – creatures in my Polity books created by the interstellar entity Dragon as a taunt to humankind. The troodon also turns up in a story I did for Asimov’s called The Other Gun. There it was an enjoyably lethal sidekick for the main character.

*In your books you’ve got a lot of crazy science fiction conflicts occurring to people. Of all the things you’ve put your characters through, which one of those ideas scares you the most, personally?

None of them really scares me because most are unlikely in my lifetime. I guess the idea of immortality combined with endless torture is pretty grim, which is why it’s the big stick wielded by religion. Closer to home is stuff in the Owner books: the technology to utterly control the populace in the hands of authoritarian government.

*You’ve got a bit of a Rip Van Winkle story at the start of Dark Intelligence; someone waking up after a century of being dead. This seems like both classic Buck Rogers mixed with Alien: Resurrection. From Twain to Sleeper, why is this notion so compelling for writers?

For me the appeal had more to do with ideas about immortality, mind recording and past sins coming back to haunt us. I also like the aspect of the timespan involved. But I guess the appeal in most cases is perspective – bringing back someone from the past to see the changes.

*Your parents both loved science fiction. What would you say to a young writer who’s parents hate science fiction?

Pity them.

*What can readers expect from the next book in the “Transformation” series?

They can expect numerous twists and turns, growing insight into what Penny Royal is up to, the introduction of a few more seriously odd characters and, I hope, another wild ride.

My Chair Addiction

I’ve often commented how when I was in my teens my interests were very wide ranging. I dabbled in electronics, I had a microscope and a chemistry set. This last was supplied with all sorts of interesting extras from the chemistry department of a college where my father lectured applied mathematics. I painted, drew, made sculptures and carved. I loved biology and spent hours collecting and identifying wriggly items from a local stream and elsewhere. I dissected the poor unfortunates the family cat dropped on the patio, kept caterpillars and watched that transformation, started an abiding interest in mycology because that’s what my mother studied on her teacher-training course.

Writing was something I started when I was about 15 – aping the stuff in those lovely luridly covered books by the likes of E C Tubb, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clarke, Asimov, Van Vogt, Blish and many besides. This continued while I entered the world of work (Engineering). By my mid-twenties I realised I wouldn’t be building a laser weapon or space drive and that I was a Jack-of-all-trades and master of none, so concentrated on writing because all my other interests were relevant.

However, despite concentrating on writing and necessarily having less time to ‘play’ because I was working for a living, all those interests never went away. They transformed. I made wine and beer, jarred preserves, restored old motorbikes, enjoyed growing stuff. I still want to know what things are in the environment, how they tick. I read a lot of science. And I repair stuff and make things.

In the latter years, with more time on my hands, the repairing stuff became a bit of a thing. If something is broken I simply cannot just throw it away – I have to take it apart to see how it works and if possible make it work again. Financially this makes no sense at all because my time would be better spent writing another book or short story, but I can’t leave it alone. Often I’m successful, more often I’m not – usually saving various parts of what I’ve disassembled because, well, they might be useful for repairing something else.

My chair addiction started on the island of Crete. The Greek kafenion chair is a pretty simple hand-made thing: carved and doweling struts , square-section legs and back etc. It’s not glued together but held together by the basket-weave seat and tautening wires running between the legs. My wife and I saw a couple of them, busted and lying in a dump while out walking. I picked them up and took them home. Out of the two I fashioned one good chair. Next was a kafenion table from the same dump, at which point Caroline walked a number of paces ahead of me laughing and pretending she didn’t know me. Like the chair I realised that the only way to do a good job was complete disassembly, removal of all the screws, nails and glue of botched previous repairs, and proper reassembly. Next came repairs for friends – usually disassembly followed by reassembly with glue and the application of sash clamps.

I found a broken bamboo chair – I spotted it at the side of the road while driving down to a beach. On the return journey it sat in the passenger seat of the car, safely held in place with the seatbelt. Caroline and my parents-in-law consigned to the back. Since I was on Crete I was able to find bamboo to replace the broken parts and I then used flattened broom twigs for the binding. Another chair I repaired and then, while talking to a friend discovered he was an upholsterer in a previous life, which was handy. The one after that was an ancient thing that had been shattered, but our wood glues are very good so I stuck it back together, carved new parts for it, then did some upholstering myself with ersatz white leather, a carefully carved surround of thin wood and fancy metal studs. A friend wanted this chair repaired as a gift for his girlfriend. Since things hadn’t gone so well in that relationship he then aimed to use it for fuel for his stove, at which point I rescued it.

After that was a wobbly Victorian chair for my old editor. That was a kind of time travel as I took it apart – the layers of upholstery, the years upon years of repairs, the hundreds of nails, studs and staples. Reassembly again involved sash clamps and reupholstering and, of course, as with all the previous items, filler, sanding, wood stain and varnish.

It’s strange how you fall into things. I now have a collection of broken chairs sitting on Crete waiting for my attention, and I will no-doubt much enjoy repairing them. But of course the ones I keep I continue enjoying because, in the end, those belongings you lavish love and attention upon, and which have their own quirky story, are the best ones to own.
     

A Couple of Pints at the Quart Pot

Since I have a large collection of interviews I thought I might put a few of them up here since this blog has been a bit neglected. Here's a transcript of the first audio interview I did from maybe 16 years ago:

A Couple of Pints at the Quart Pot

or

Big Toys and Alien Creatures

Neal Asher is a classic overnight success; he was signed by Pan Macmillan in 2000 after twenty years working his way up through the small presses.  (A number of his early pieces were, in fact, published by Pigasus (link).)  His novels show the depth of background Asher has developed over the course of that time, with centuries of history and oodles of technology alongside quite a collection of nonsense names.  The setting of all three novels has become known as the Runcible Universe as this is the name Asher has given to the gateway device normally used for travel between worlds.  These devices, and much else in the Human Polity, are actually controlled by Artificial Intelligences.  Gridlinked (2001) and The Line of Polity (2003) each use the idea that some humans don’t like this idea, but the centre of the novels - as with The Skinner (2002) - is in encounters with the alien.  They are highly readable, fast paced and gripping books with subtly complex plots and well realised settings.

I met Neal in deepest Essex, where he has lived all his life, for his first face-to-face interview and, settling down in the leather chairs of the Quart Pot, began by asking how much of Neal’s short work was set in runcible universe.

Well, bits of the ideas involved are in all my stories, but those definitely not involving runcibles … probably a third, something like that.  In fact, my next book isn’t set in that universe.

Is it completely new territory or something you’ve looked at in short stories before?

It’s called Cowl.  I did it as a novella ages ago.  Someone was aiming to publish it back then but they gave up on their little venture and it just sat in my files - novellas are particularly difficult to get published.  When it came for me to do the second contract with Macmillan, I thought ‘well I’d like another three book contract please, better think about what I’m going to do.’  I like to alternate things a bit, I don’t like to stick with Cormac all the time.  I thought of that novella because there are so many ideas in it that needed to be developed. Lots of toys, I loved it and thought it could be a book, really.  There’s only one short story related to it, ‘The Torbeast’s Prison’ published in Kimota.

Cowl is time travel, but it’s big time travel. There are a lot of time travel stories completely wrapped up in human history but there’s an awful lot more time before that.  In my reading I like things like Hawksbill Station by Silverberg [also published as The Anvil of Time], where they were banging criminals back to the time of the trilobites.  It’s been around for a while [first published in 1967] but I just like that sort of ‘big time’. My book involves very far future humans travelling back, and a creature at the beginning of time apparently trying to wipe out the whole of human history, and of course plenty of gratuitous violence.

(As a matter of interest. I’ve got a ‘Best of Robert Silverberg’ collection containing the 20,000 word novella Hawksbill Station which was published in 1967. He then expanded that into the novel a couple of years later. Interesting coincidence.)

Just for a change.

Yeah, just for a change [laughs].

You’re a full time writer now - how long since you made the switch?

This is my second summer, just starting, where I’m not doing what I did before, which was contract grass cutting.  I went through about 10, 15 years working in engineering, but ended up going self-employed round about 1987.  I set up my own business, cutting grass, cutting trees, all that sort of thing.  It was great as far as being a writer was concerned, as you go out in the summer and do all this work and when it dies off in the winter you sit down at the word processor.

I’ve been trying very hard to think of anyone else who has gone from small press publication short stories to US hardback [Gridlinked is due out in the USA in autumn 2003].

It’s a funny old route I’ve taken - bloody long one, I know that.  Have you seen any of those articles I’ve done on my website - there’s one on there that was written before I was taken up by Macmillan, how I’d worked my way up through the small press from endless rejections to stories being accepted and magazines folding to stories being accepted and getting a free copy of the magazine to some money and gradually up and up. … all the Tanjen stuff was great.

What happened?  They don’t seem to have any presence online at all.

They’re dead. He couldn’t win, despite quality production - if you see a copy of The Engineer, it was beautifully done.  It’s very difficult to start up a publishing company where you come up against the big companies.  It’s not about the product, it’s about the distribution.  You get someone like Macmillan, they’ll send catalogues out and the bookshop will order loads of different things and they’ll all go in a box to go out to the shop. Whereas, if you are a little publisher, they say ‘ok , we’ll have that’ so you’ve got to get one book there. Not cost effective – it just doesn’t work. And another one’s just gone - Big Engine.

Very frustrating.

It’s hard work. You’ve got to do it in such a way that you are not constantly losing money, pumping money in with no return. The Tanjen books were really good compared to those produced by some large publishers.  You’ve probably had it happen - you buy this lovely looking book from Smiths, read it once and the second time the pages are falling out.  I’ve got that with my copy of The Use of Weapons [by Iain M. Banks]. But unfortunately quality production isn’t enough.

>Question here? What are you reading at the moment?

I wonder if because you write stuff you’re critical faculties are geared up a little bit higher.  I find it harder and harder to get hold of something that I enjoy reading, which is why it’s lovely to pick up an Alastair Reynolds book or a Richard Morgan.  Altered Carbon is one of those books where you don’t get time to take a breath.  It drags you straight in there. It’s great.

One could say yours are a little similar.  They’re pretty non-stop.

Thank you very much

I definitely enjoyed the Skinner better than the other two.

Kevin Patrick Mahoney (GENre http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Nook/1082/genreindex.html ) says that he thinks that the Skinner is the best of them all.  I tend to agree.

Is that because it’s a bit freer from what you’ve written before?  Because it’s set so much later?

With a stand alone book I’ve got no constraints. I can just let myself go. I found that with The Line of Polity I had to keep referring back.  I find it very hard to kill my characters as well, so I tend to find things for them to do, which I shouldn’t, really.  That’s changing a bit now.

You’ve mentioned Banks already.  I’ve read reviews which compare your work with his Culture.  Do you feel that’s valid?

Yeah, you can compare it, but it’s not so much that.  I read Banks, and when I actually consider what could happen in the future and how things would run, what he has done with the Culture is absolutely right. We make machines to do things better than we do them - all our tools, everything.  A pair of pliers is made to grip better, harder than you can. We’re making thinking machines now, so it’s going to reach a point where we are going to get machines that can think better than us and they will naturally take over.  Now, whether they take over in a violent manner or not or whatever, it will happen. You’ll have AI managers and they’re just going to be better at managing, they can be on the job 24x7 can’t they?  They don’t have to go and get slaughtered on a Friday night and have a hangover.  It just struck me as perfectly logical - and what a way to go. I’ve got a cynical view of human nature.  You’ve just got to read the papers and look at the news to have that confirmed and it’s almost like I can’t think of a way where we could govern ourselves without stuffing it up.

Another view of what might happen comes from people like Vernor Vinge, who seems to expect that some time in the next 20 to 50 years that we’re all going to go pop because the machines won’t need us.

The Singularity - the AI snowball effect, where it takes the whole lot over.  There’s that view.  Another one comes out in Cowl.  It’s directly related to what’s very topical at the minute with SARS, that we are breeding stronger diseases and weaker humans.  You can see it with things like MRSAs in hospitals and the use of antibiotics, making bugs that are resistant to antibiotics; like giving rat poison to rats.  It’ll kill 998 out of a thousand but then the two that remain are resistant to rat poison, and they breed.  We’re doing that with bugs and bugs are in the billions.  So a possible future is that plague scenario.

So we all end up as slurry again, back to the primordial.

Yeah - working our way up again.  Unless we get off this planet.

That has been an eternal theme of science fiction, hasn’t it?  That we have to get our eggs out of the one basket.

There’s another one in Cowl.  A far future human is talking to a guy from 100 years in our future whilst they are both standing looking out over the carboniferous forests.  The far future human says ‘you were provided in your time with massive amounts of fossil fuels and you squandered them instead of using them to get off the planet.’

Fossil fuels power our technology and we’re just powering ourselves nowhere.  It’s a bit depressing really.  You get a war and everyone gets motivated - not necessarily the present one, but a real crisis and everyone gets motivated.  If you could just apply that same kind of motivation to a project for the human race wouldn’t it be good?

In Gridlinked, Mr Crane is insane.  Unless something like that happens to a Golem, are they going to be moral people?

I was just about to say ‘you’re going to go all “Three Laws of Robotics” on me aren’t you?’

No, basically.  The book I’m on now is called Brass Man. You can possibly guess what might be going on there but I’ve been getting into that a bit, about the Golem and the assumption - that Trekkie assumption - that the android with his positronic brain is always morally a good guy who won’t kill anybody and all that nonsense.  I like it when you have all that, and then the android does the unexpected. When a person is faced up against a Golem and says ‘you can’t kill me’ and the Golem says ‘why?’ Thump.

An article in Foundation was talking about Star Trek, asking why there weren’t any gays or lesbians in their perfect universe.

It’s got to be fear of failing to sell.  A lot of people are very bigoted; you get a knee jerk reaction about it all.  I went through a period where I was thinking ‘should I make Gant and Thorn gay lovers?’  Then I thought that I don’t have much sex in my books anyway - makes all the pages sticky - and wondered why I was thinking that.  In reality, I don’t want to go exploring all those issues anyway.  I’m writing Schwarzenegger fiction.

I did notice there was a bit more justification for Skellor in this book, rather than that he’d just gone mad and lost it like Pelter in Gridlinked.

Yeah, you have to look a bit more behind the characters, but I think my biggest fear in doing too much of that is that I don’t want to bore the reader.  Yes, some people want more justification, they want to know more about the history of the characters - was Arian Pelter abused by his father - but how deep should I go?  What kind of fiction am I writing?  I’m writing action-centred science fiction with big boys’ toys and alien creatures and so forth.  I don’t want to get that wrapped up in the psychology.

There’s something to be said for the idea that some people just are bad.

Just downright bad [laughs], that’s how he is, full stop.

You say you don’t like killing off characters.  It seems to me your protagonists are getting a bit invulnerable.

Yeah, there’s a big danger there.  I’ve seen it in a lot of fiction where you make your characters invulnerable and it destroys the story. 

They end up wandering around fighting monsters they can kill with one punch.

One of the chapter starts in Gridlinked, which I reread just recently, was saying that: you’d think with the big increases in wonderful technology for the police, for security, military, this kind of thing, that you’d reach a stage where the criminal just can’t do anything.  Obviously it’s just not like that because your criminals are going to be in an arms race with the people who are trying to stop them.  So, yeah, I can make my characters more invulnerable, the good guys, but then you make the bad guys like that as well.  It just takes a few more exploding moons and so on to finish the baddies off.

In fact, whilst everyone from Mika to Gant to Skellor are getting stronger, Cormac seems to be intentionally made …

Human.

And that’s a product of his choice, to do that, to weaken himself, in a certain sense.

Choice.  I think his choice was taken way from him.

As far as having the gridlink taken way, yes but in Polity there is discussion of how he has chosen to need sleep and a reference to the fact that he is silver haired.

He’s staying human.

It seems unusual to find someone like Alastair Reynolds who is actually a scientist working in science fiction.

Is it though?  Asimov.

Yeah, you can come up with a list of writers who are scientists.

You get people coming in from all different directions.  There’s a literary side of it, and perhaps people involved in that are going to lean more towards the fantastic, not going to be quite so much on the practical technological elements.  Then you get people coming from the other side who are.  Most writers are not from practical professions, though.

Perhaps it’s partially a product of the New Wave period which was so much about writing literate fiction, with the emphasis more on being a good writer than a good technologist.

You’ve got to be both though, in the end.

It is a broad enough field that you can have people like Ursula K Le Guin, who isn’t so dependent on the tech, despite inventing the ansible.

Ansible / Runcible.

So was that a sound alike?

No, yes, maybe. I tracked down a nonsense word from Edward Lear. It was close to ansible so I used it for the instantaneous transport system. But you do often get similar ideas surfacing separately.  I’ve talked about this to Alastair Reynolds, and had a brief exchange with China Meiville on the subject.  In some sense there seem to be ideas which have their time. Everybody goes ‘Einstein, wonderful chap, came up with the theory of relativity and so on’ but if Einstein hadn’t been there, somebody else would have done it within the same period because the time is ready for the idea, everything is coming together at that time. The same thing happens in the science fiction world.

To a certain extent, you have to understand a certain amount of jargon before you can make a lot of progress in science fiction.  SF jargon, like knowing what a positronic robot is; we all know Asimov invented that and that the three laws of robotics came from there.

I’ve found it with my wife reading my books.  She had never read SF before, and nor had her family; just hearing how people who don’t read science fiction try to read it. They tend to get hauled up. The advice I give is that when you come to something you don't understand, just skip it.  It normally comes out in the story anyway, doesn’t it?  It’s like AI – it should be obvious in the context. Then again, you go to the farming community around here and AI is artificial insemination.  Also, I had Gridlinked reviewed by some readers on BBC Essex.  They had a book club thing where the readers would all go off to read a book then come back to talk about it on air. They weren’t science fiction readers and they all came back talking about A-ones.

You find that science fiction writers form a conversation across decades, in the way that they are influenced by each other and carry ideas forward.  You could suggest that Bank’s Culture was a product of a certain era and maybe in ten years time we’ll feel that what you’re writing now is an answer to that, or a reflection on that.

Like having Golem androids that go around ripping people’s heads off is an answer to the three laws of robotics?  It also ties into the idea that certain things come out in their time.  Nanotechnology came into SF x years back and subsequent development of the ideas of nanotechnology has made it more organic, a thing that grows root-like and plant-like.  They come out in their time.  In Line of Polity, the Occam Razor starship is taken over by Jain technology.  I’d written that when I hadn’t read an Alastair Reynolds book. Then I pick up Redemption Ark - same bloody thing, isn’t it!  Space ship taken over by this organic technology growing through it.  How spooky is that?  And a major character in his book is also called Thorn.  Go figure!

Do you find that names come easily to you?

I find that I’ll bring a character in and just think of something and write it down, thinking that if it’s not good enough, I can just change it.  Then I start writing with it and it gets acquired by the story.  Once I’ve been writing with a name for a bit, I don’t want to change it, because that is that person.  Kevin Patrick Mahoney commented on Line of Polity about how the name Skellor made him think of Skeletor from Masters of the Universe.  Now, there’s was a little bit of deliberate manipulation in that name – a bit like skeleton. I started using it and I thought at one point ‘bit too much like Skeletor, I must change that’.  I was going to change it to something like Skellan.  I kept going through it and reached the point where I couldn’t change it because he was Skellor. Cormac is Irish for champion, so that was deliberate, but most of them, I just bang them in because I want to get on with the story.

In Gridlinked you make a reference to an anti gravity car that looks like a Ford Cortina.  It made me wonder why on Earth they would remember a late 20^th century car.

Science fiction, even though we’re supposed to be writing about the future, actually reflects the time we live in.  All you’ve got to do is come into pubs like this and look around and there’s this attraction to the past, these old things which, at the time, were crap.  The Ford Cortina was crap but 10, 20, 50 years down the line - ‘god, that’s a Ford Cortina you’ve got there! Do it up, it’ll be worth a fortune.’  Kit cars always have a bit of the look of old sports cars, that kind of attitude, and I thought, well I could do a Model T Ford, which I have done in some of my short stories, or choose something which is really famous in our time or worthy from the past like a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, but no, fuck it, Ford Cortina go for it.  I’m from Essex and I don’t care.

When I was writing that down on my list of questions I wondered whether it was meant to be a Ford Prefect reference.

No, you’re reading too much into it.  You get an awful lot of that, I find.  There are authors scattered all over the world reading reviews of their books and thinking ‘god, I didn’t realise I was so clever!’  I read a review online of Mason’s Rats.  The stories took the idea of what may be going to evolve intelligence next.  Rats are getting pretty close to being tool users, they’ve got little hands and everything, and I just displaced it a little bit into the future.  I thought I could play with that, have a little bit of fun with the idea, which I did.  Basically, I just enjoyed myself for a bit.  Then there’s this review - it was almost as long as the three stories.  Reading through it, it was going on about the political meanings and the deep meanings of this and the deep meanings of that and I’m thinking ‘fuck me, you’re talking bollocks’.

One of the reviews I read makes a reference to the Skinner’s head …

That’s another one of those things.  I know what you’re talking about, The Thing.  As soon as I read it I thought, yeah, you’re right, but it doesn’t come consciously though, it’s just what looks good.

Well, I’m not familiar with the movie so it didn’t occur to me at all.  In any case, the Skinner is probably the best visualised character, thing, in your work.

The initial short story, ‘Spatterjay’, came from a dream.  I had this dream about some people on a beach and these big, long, horrible hands coming out and grabbing somebody and taking them and then something horrible capering off into the distance.  Then there was another bit where some people are standing on a bridge, looking down into a stream and in the back of my mind, in this dream, I know it’s an alien world.  In the stream there’s some trout, but all of a sudden one rears this leech head out of the water and drops back down again and you realise no, not trout.

Africa Zero is a completely separate setting.

Yes, totally.

It’s a great concept. 

But not entirely original. I guess there are people who would feel the need to be thought of as utterly original.  Well, that doesn’t bother me a vast amount.  All I want to be thought of is entertaining. But thinking about how things relate to different books, Africa Zero has a combination of influences - it ventured into a world like that in World Enough and Time by James Kahn.  It’s got a bit of the feel of that, but also of a lovely book, Mountains of the Moon which I was reading at the time - not science fiction, it’s about botanists in Africa.  The book is wonderful, the stuff you’re reading about in there.  As you’ll probably realise, I’m heavily into the ecologies and biology of things.  On Mountains of the Moon they don’t have heathers, they have heather trees, and the lobelias are giant lobelias. It was that book and the James Kahn which was the feeling of Africa Zero, where I went with it.

Do you think you’ll go back to that setting?

I want to go back to them all - I just haven’t the time.  Everybody picks up on their favourite bit and says ‘why don’t you do a book about that?’  There’s loads of places I want to revisit like that, and I want to create some new ones, but it’s getting the time to do it all.

Do you think you’ll ever go back to your early fantasy books which are in the drawer?

Well, I’m perpetually ahead of the game with the publisher - Cowl was delivered way before time.  Brass Man, which is due next March, I’m definitely more than half way through.  I’d like to be in a position where I’m a year ahead of the game and then I can turn around and look at these other things.  I’d like to rework the fantasy totally - and I’ve got a contemporary one as well.

That’s part of the question, really.  Have you gone so far beyond what you were capable of when you wrote those that it starts looking …

Yeah, the fantasy, there’s so much more to do there. You learn such huge amounts. Obviously, I’ve been writing these stories for a long time and mostly, the only feedback you get is people saying they liked it or they didn’t or that they publish it or they don’t.  You get no editing help, really, until you get taken up by a big publisher. With Macmillan, the manuscript went in to Peter Lavery and he gets his pencil out. You think you’ve got it fined down perfectly, but every sentence he’s on there with that bloody pencil. When he sent the manuscript back the first time, he sent a rubber along with it and said ‘take on board what you want to take on board.’ That was the attitude, but I learnt so much more in that process. I’ve learnt more in the last few years doing this than I learnt in the ten before that.

With the editing at Macmillan, you get two lots.  Peter goes through it and does his bit and you go through it making the alterations you want, discarding the bits you don’t want, changing bits where he’s got the wrong end of the stick.  That’s essential, because if he’s got the wrong end of the stick, you haven’t written it clearly enough.  You go through all that and then it goes back and the copy editor goes through it and it comes back to you again.  There’s a lot of house style involved in it plus picking up bits that have been missed by Peter, I guess.

>Question?

It’s a lonely, introvert pursuit, which can be quite difficult to maintain and then the bastard thing is, when you’re successful at it they want you to be an extrovert.  ‘Come and stand in front of 30 people and read your story’.

>Question?

You have to train yourself - but people write in different ways.

Do you have a plot outline when you start?

No.

A big idea - like the Skinner?

A lot of it happens at the processor.  Other writers do it totally differently, plan it out with little bits of paper stuck on a notice board ‘this is what happens and then this’.  If  I try to do that I get bored with it because I know what’s going to happen.  I will have images - I’ll think ‘I want this image’.  The sails was one in The Skinner.  I know I’ve got to have this, got to use this image, but then I’ve got to create the world to justify it.  You can’t just  use it and that’s it.

>Question?

I try to stick to this idea of doing x words a day - and I’ve read it in so many author interviews, that they do this much writing a day and I think to myself ‘If you’re doing that much and these are your books, have you lost some in between?’  When I’m steaming into a book - when I was doing Line of Polity and The Skinner, when I was in the creative writing process, I was averaging 10,000 words a week, going on like that, but it doesn’t last.  Once you’ve done all that you’ve got loads of editing, going over and over it. Then, of course, it goes off to the various editors and comes back, and you spend weeks doing that. Then there’s synopses or a blurbs. I don’t actually do 10,000 a week every week.  I am trying to get back to that gold standard with the one I’m doing at the moment and failing miserably.

Of course, today this is my fault, dragging the writer away from his desk.

[ tape ends ]

Writing Update

As ever I’ve been pretty lax in posting stuff here. Mostly I’ve been posting on Facebook or Twitter. I could justify this by saying I get more reaction and interaction there, and that more people spend their time on those social media rather than on blogs. Do I need to justify it? Not really. But the real reason I post there is because it’s easier to bang off a short paragraph about what I’m doing and feed it into the modern version of ‘today’s newspaper tomorrow’s chip paper’. I also spend a lot of my internet time using an Ipad, and typing out some long post on that touchscreen, with just a little window in which to see it, I find annoying. Anyway, I hope the recent FB catch-up posts here have served a purpose. But now I’ll have a ramble through the recent past and present, and probably repeat a lot of what you’ve already read in the catch-ups and elsewhere.

The main reason I’m writing here now is to take breaks from going through the copy editing of The Human – third book in the ‘Rise of the Jain’ trilogy (published on April 16th 2019). It’s a boring chore of mostly going through with a mouse to click ‘accept’ or ‘reject’. By this time I’m about sick of a book I’ve written and gone through ad nauseum and only with gritted teeth can manage two or three chapters without trying to think of other ‘essential’ task to do, like make a coffee, or put bee’s wax on a door. The Human brings me up-to-date on my present contract with Macmillan. At some point I’ll have a chat with Bella Pagan at Macmillan about a new contract (and suggest it’s time for a pay rise) but, despite this contract coming to an end, that does not mean I’ve stopped writing.

Since I was again ahead of my contract I turned my attention to writing short stories. One I started using something I’d excised from a previous book, but it grew in the telling and became a book itself titled Jack Four. This is the tale of a clone taken to the King’s Ship to be experimented upon, steadily ramping up into a border incident between the Polity and the prador kingdom. That done to first draft I put it aside and went back to short stories again. I did a few. Skin will appear in an Ian Whates anthology, An Alien on Crete will appear in Asimov’s and a novella called Moral Biology is destined to appear in Analog. I have others besides I’ve either yet to send or have been rejected. The Bosch is a novella that concerns a biotech world in the far future (after the Polity) where the ruler of that world raises the creatures of Hieronymus Bosch in a quest for vengeance. The Host is linked to Moral Biology. While Longevity Averaging is a near future (novella) based on my reading of present day life-extension research – the ‘longevity averaging’ of the title concerns how government works out when you get your pension.

Again, however, while in short story mode, I started something that had legs and kept on running. I have a working title for it of Cacoraptors but suspect I’ll be changing that in due course. This concerns the colonisation of a world just at about the time when the prador/human war starts up. All the lovable elements are there: prador, Jain tech, grotesque and vicious alien creatures (besides the prador, that is), human transformation, Polity double-dealing and lots of smoking wreckage. However, I’m writing this one in a different way. As I wrote what was initially a short story I started putting in ‘retroacts’ to fill in background. This became, to me, as interesting as the ongoing story and I did more and more. Now the book runs with the story in the present at the start of each chapter followed by the background that has led to present events. Generally, as the book goes on, I’m delving further and further into the past with the latter, but I am mixing it up a bit by putting in past events where they are relevant to the present ones. The timeline is all over the place. It’s interesting and tangled, and I hope you find it interesting too. I was a bit unsure about doing this and considered straightening out the timeline, but remembering that one of my top ten favourite books is Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks, I’ll stick with it.

So there you have it – you’re up to date with stuff about my work . . . or rather, you’re not. Something I did three years ago will be seeing the light of day soon. I also have other stuff I have to keep my mouth shut about. And no, before you get excited, no one is making films of any of my books.

The Soldier - UK Cover

Here's the cover for the UK version of The Soldier - first books of Rise of the Jain. There's more about this here over on Macmillan Tor.

Macmillan Doing Stuff

So anyway, here's a thing: Macmillan are doing all sorts of good stuff. First there are my books appearing on Audible UK. Second, the one you don't know about till right now, is they're doing new covers for my backlist for another push on them. I've seen these covers and they are pretty damned cool. First up will be the Cormac books...

And here, for your listening pleasure, are soundcloud links to those books that are now up on Audible UK:

https://soundcloud.com/pan-macmillan/infinity-engine-by-neal-asher

https://soundcloud.com/pan-macmillan/the-departure-by-neal-asher

https://soundcloud.com/pan-macmillan/prador-moon-by-neal-asher

https://soundcloud.com/pan-macmillan/zero-point-by-neal-asher

https://soundcloud.com/pan-macmillan/shadow-of-the-scorpion-by-neal-asher

Thanks Macmillan!

Facebook Catch up

Few bits from FB over the last couple of months...

June 6^th

How many here have tried this online dating lark? I've just about given up now. No dear, clinically obese is not 'a bit curvy' and 20 or 30 is not 'a few extra pounds'. And seriously. In this age when just about any bit of hardware takes a picture, claiming you don't have a recent one is a bit of a joke!

June 8^th

Right, election day is here and now I breathe a sigh of relief. I will not be posting anymore party political stuff - too divisive, polarising. I can't be doing with seeing the responses of 'friends', or some of their posts, and thinking 'wanker'. Back to science, books, writing and occasional embarrassing details about my personal life. 

13^th June

I had a stinking cold starting the week before last and extending into last week. During that time my focus was mainly on trying not to feel like crap. I had some other work to deal with too and didn't get much of the latest novel done. Looking on the bright side, one of my escapes from feeling like crap (beside stuffing my face with comfort food) was really getting into reading again, which is great. But now I'm back on it: 2,000 words done yesterday and 2,000 done today.

29^th June

Ooh, snippy. 'I don't like your opinions therefore I won't read your books anymore'. *sigh* Hell, if I took that attitude I would have missed out on a lot of great books, films too. I guess I'm as guilty, but people really need to look outside their sociopolitical bubbles sometimes.

3rd July

Aaargh! Bloody computers ... or in this case printers ... I think. Y'know, I've got a job of making up stuff, writing it down and keeping readers entertained. I really REALLY don't want to spend hours pissing about, searching the internet, trying and failing to load firmware etc ad nauseum. I really don't want my printer unilaterally deciding that, for one file, paper must be fed in manually, and then telling me about a non-existent paper jam! Aaaargh!

5^th July

2,000 words yesterday but the word counts are dropping now. At 116,000 words I've reached the stage in the middle-of-a-trilogy book where I have to deliver a satisfying ending but also maintain the overall story arc of the trilogy. This has made me realise that something I have been signalling, even from the end of the first book, needs to be toned down. This ... event ... is the ending of the second book but it needs to be more of a surprise. Today I'll copy the document and start tearing it apart, excising stuff and sticking it back together again to see how that works out...

Took a Walk

Last weekend I decided, rather than sit in the house and arse around on Facebook, that I should head off and walk somewhere pleasant, maybe have some lunch out too. I got in my car and drove to the village of Althorne, abandoned my car and headed down to the River Crouch estuary.

A stroll along the edge of here has been part of my walking routine but, from my house, that involves a lot of walking along the sides of the roads, which ain’t that great. Though I have to admit to some enjoyment since this is the first English Spring I’ve seen in 10 years.

So I headed down and along the edge of the estuary to Burnham-on-Crouch. It’s pleasant down there and I was reminded of the time when, at about age 20, I was training myself for a walking holiday in the Lake District. I had someone drive me out and dump me by Bradwell power station and walked back in, following the sea wall to where my parent’s house was located. This was about 20 miles.

I was of course writing stuff at the time and I made plenty of notes while tramping along and afterwards turned this into an article, which I sent to a walking magazine. I was young and naive then and unfamiliar with the ways of the writing world, so made the common mistake of becoming impatient and sending off a snotty letter when I hadn’t heard something for a while. The editor sent my article back telling me to shove it. Apparently he had been about to go and take pictures of the area to complement the article, which he was going to publish.

That would have been my first publication success had I not been a dick. I wonder now what course I would have taken if it had been published. Maybe now I would be a jobbing writer turning out articles for various magazines and newspapers while yearning to be a novelist.

Anyway, back to the walk… I arrived in Burnham after an hour and a half. My plan had been to have lunch there, but most of the pubs were still closed and, really, it takes a little while to cool down after a good walk and actually feel hungry. Instead I found a café and had a cream tea. All very English and, I admit, the first time in my life I had ever eaten a scone with clotted cream and jam.

After whiling away a pleasant time I then headed back. A search on the internet told me this walk was 5 miles so, with the return journey, 10 miles. Others told me it was 3 miles but I thought no. Average walking speed is 3.1 miles (though dependent on a lot of factors) and I was walking fast. I plumped for 8 or 9 miles. Now having traced the route on Google Earth I find it was a total of 11 miles.

Yesterday I decided to head the other direction along the Crouch to a place called Fambridge. Again the internet told me this was about 5 miles. It took me 2 hours to reach a pub called the Ferryboat where I intended to guzzle a pint of something, but when I got there it was closed for refurbishment. Following directions I headed to a nearby marina bar and there drank a pint of Thatcher’s cider before heading back. My estimate of 10 miles was again upgraded by Google Earth, this time to 14.8 miles. I thought I felt a bit knackered.

And here I am writing an article in a different way. No waxing lyrical about crab shells stuck to the sea grass, dry and papery and rising about me like confetti as I walked through them. Nothing about sun and salt bleached driftwood taking on the appearance of alien creatures that had hauled themselves from the depths. Aliens and things of a crabby nature are elsewhere now.   

Forbidden Planet Signing

Okay, book signing in Forbidden Planet…

I headed up to London aiming to arrive at the bookshop at around 4.30 where I was to meet the Macmillan publicist, Jamie-Lee Nardone, outside. The trip was fast so I ended up wandering down towards the shop at about 3.45. Not wanting to hang about there I stepped into a nearby pub and whiled away the time with a few whiskies.

I then met Jamie outside the shop and we crossed the road to eat burgers and drink a couple of beers before going into said shop. First order of business was to sign maybe 30 or so copies of Infinity Engine people had ordered. I managed to put a pen through the page of one copy, then spilled coffee on someone’s computer mouse. Maybe those whiskies hadn’t been such a good idea.

Out in the shop I signed plenty of books. I’m told there were about 30 people there but everyone had more than their copies of Infinity Engine. This I guess is my fault since I don’t do signings very often. Of particular note was the stack brought by Sharon Sasaki from Canada – it stood about four feet tall. And thanks for the pen Sharon!

Jamie took lots of pictures with people’s mobile phones and all was good. Thanks too to Adam? Gerard? ( Sorry, but while I can remember most details of 140,000 word book, I forget people’s names) and his wife who brought me a gift of a bottle of gin. Checking the label I see that it’s 57% proof so that’ll be an interesting experience when I start imbibing (not yet, I like a big space between my hangovers).

After signing the books people had bought and brought I then signed the bookshop stock. That was a nice quantity so if you want a signed copy get down to Forbidden Planet now. Next was a venture around the corner to The Angel where various fans plied me with beer. I don't think I was too disgraceful ... then again there are pictures yet to appear. I did my circulating but sorry if I missed chatting to any of you.

At about 10 I buggered off to catch a train. I got aboard determined not to fall asleep and end up in Southend like the last time. A guy sitting opposite me was having a similar problem – talking on his mobile phone with earphones then slumping sideways in his seat and snoring. 

I was fine and got out at Wickford. I then asked a woman sitting in the station about the train to Althorne. Apparently there wasn’t one but her brother was picking her up and that’s where she was going. Amy and Lawrence gave me a lift and dropped me off near my home. The kindness of strangers eh?

This morning I’m not particularly hungover. Maybe that was due to the ‘organic’ beer in The Angel. I just went for a 3-mile walk to collect my car and shall now slide back into the day job. Y’know, space ships to blow up. Ho-hum.

Cheers to those who took these pictures, which I swiped off Facebook. And my thanks to the staff of Forbidden Planet.

Plans...

When I say that I don’t plan, that it all happens at the keyboard for me, that is perhaps a little bit Inaccurate. I do have vague plans in my mind that are usually related to images. There’ll be something there for a conclusion to a book somewhere off in the misty future and then plans for the nearer future when I start writing and consider what section to write next. The ‘happens at the keyboard’ bit is what determines how or if I bring them to fruition. Sometimes I do, sometimes I destroy them completely and go in a different direction. Sometimes I find something I’ve completely missed.

Take for example some highly dangerous and irascible assassin drones. These actors were on scene and, while I was concentrating on other matters, I left them twiddling their thumbs … or perhaps other more lethal appendages. You can’t do that. Yeah you can provide some make-work but that’s pretty difficult when the characters concerned are so effective. The thing to do then is throw them into the fray and see what happens.

It’s a bit like strategizing a battle between horse cavalry then having a tank roll onto the scene, then deciding to make some of the horses pacifists and then have all of them sprout wings when you abruptly turn the battlefield on its edge, and then note that the tank has Velcro treads. The word I’m groping for here is protean. I make plans and I plot but the work in progress is often derailed and always falling into a new shape. Corrections and new ideas constantly alter that shape. Sometimes I chew on the edge of my desk in frustration. Sometimes a solution and epiphany appears in just one sentence, like, for example:

She had just rail-gunned the prador fleet, and the other Polity ships opened fire a moment later.    

I wonder what the shape will be after that?

Writing Routine

I've just been writing out some bits and pieces for publicity, specifically 'Top ten things about me I'd like my readers to know' for a website called Female First. Like all this stuff it then went into my 'Articles' file. There's a lot in there so I took a look. I found this one, which appeared somewhere or other. There have been a few hiccups along the way, but not much has changed...

Writing Routine

When I started out I didn’t have any writing routine, I had a job. Writing was a hobby I indulged in over the weekends or in the evening when I wasn’t: too knackered, watching TV, reading a book, or up the pub. I only ever started counting words upon discovering, in John Braine’s Writing a Novel, that this might be a professional approach. This was probably when I was in my early twenties, and then I used the old technique of working out a line average and from that a page average. It wasn’t until I had been writing on and off for maybe ten years that I started to establish any kind of routine, thought I couldn’t put a finger on an exact date, and this routine relates simply to the aphorism ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’

When you start word-counting you realise that the pages you have written ain’t adding up to a book (and here I’m talking about the time when the average SF novel was a mere 70,000 words). The prospect can be daunting, and my approach was to ensure that I wrote something every day. That’s all.

The next routine I established was when I went self-employed. Getting tired of working in factories on milling machines and lathes, I looked elsewhere. This was perhaps because of a boredom factor creeping in when I was either on production work (Neal, we want a thousand square aluminium blocks this size with a hole drilled in them) or pressing the start button on some computerized machine. I tried building and then, as a result of some work I did clearing up the mess left by the storm of 1987, ended up doing tree-work, hedging, contract grass cutting and just about anything else I could turn my hand to. The bulk of this work was during the summer, so I had plenty of spare time in the winter. I spent most of my free days during those winters writing, almost as if this was a real job.

I started writing down my daily word-count, then I got the stunning idea that maybe I should set targets for myself. Well, I think it was my idea, though it’s just as likely I picked it up out of some ‘How to’ book. I can’t remember the target I set, but suspect it might have been about 1,000 words. It was during this time I discovered the small presses, had my first short story published in Back Brain Recluse then a series of stories elsewhere, then Mindgames: Fool’s Mate, The Parasite and The Engineer. Then came the big hit when Gridlinked, The Skinner and a third book as yet written were picked up by Macmillan. Sensible word-counts briefly went out the window when Peter Lavery wanted Gridlinked expanded from about 65,000 words, (I took it up to 135,000 in two weeks – and added Mr Crane) and The Skinner expanded from 80,000 words (I was a little bit more leisurely over that as I took it up to 150,000 words).

I gave up the day job a year or so after this – after Gridlinked and The Skinner had been published and while The Line of Polity was growing nicely – and began to establish a proper routine. Here I was at an advantage over many writers in that I’d been self-employed for 15 years, therefore knew what it was to motivate myself. I knew how to get up and get to work without the driving fear of a clocking-in clock, angry foreman or written warnings. The cuts to the pay packet were there, of course, in that the moment I stopped working, even for a cup of coffee, I would cease to earn.

I started the new job by being up at 8.00 and writing until 5.00. I aimed to write 1,000 words a day for five days a week (the words were of course now much easier to count with a word processor program), but after a year found myself way ahead and knew the target was just too easy. I upped this to 2,000 and still found it too easy, but then this was all my words, so next I discounted journal entries, blog posts, and stuff I put on message boards (yes, I even counted the words in them) and reset my target to 2,000 words of fiction. This is what I’ve stuck to ever since. When I get started each day I read through and correct the previous day’s 2,000 words, then start on the next. As I reach that figure I try to simply stop, and not go on until reaching a natural break. If you just stop while you know what you’re going to write next, it’s easier to get going again the next day.

Now, those of you with a mathematical turn of mind will be thinking, where’s the 365,000 word novel every year? Unfortunately, turning professional brings home to you the importance of other aspects of writing that can take up many weeks. And now, I no longer feel guilty when I simply write the word ‘editing’, in my journal, where I usually note down my word-count.

    

That’s it really: the glamorous life of a writer.