Another Interview

Here's a recent interview with me conducted by Douglas R Cobb. I'm probably repeating a lot of stuff considering how many of these I've done.

Different SF writers have different names for their interstellar civilization. Ian M Banks has the Culture, Star trek has the Federation and the Dominion, empires and kingdoms have been used too. The Polity was my own particular take on this. I wanted something big, sprawling and complicated in which I could set just about any SF story. Its inception was in numerous short stories where similar technology might be used, similar alien life, agents, characters and gradually grew almost like a crystal forming. Runcible gates where a hat-tip to the ansible, but grew into a science whose nomenclature evolved from the poem The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear (a tachyon, for example, is called ‘pea-green’). I wanted my Polity linked up by spaceships and instantaneous matter transmission and the runcible gates are the latter, giving people the ability to step across light-years in an instant.

Conflicts

Nice review of Conflicts here.

Neal Asher's "The Cuisinart Effect" is a romp equal to the earlier story from Andy Remic. A hard-nosed officer leads a group of soldiers into the distant past in order to foil their enemy's plot to kidnap dinosaurs and use them as weapons of mass destruction. (Wow. The sentences I type sometimes.) The dinosaurs are, of course, awesome. And they provide an excellent backdrop for the story's real conflict: the inhuman "by the book" officer versus the flawed but empathetic soldiers. I'm not familiar with Mr. Asher's other work, but got the impression that this was linked into an existing world. I'm sure I missed a few nuances because of that, but, whatever. Dinosaurs.

Where's My Robot Butler?

I’ve been watching some You Tube videos and reading up on some stuff about the ‘technological singularity’. Vernor Vinge’s ideas about this relate more to an explosion in technological development brought about by artificial intelligence, but there are other definitions out there. I was watching one video in which someone tracked the doubling of technological development from two thousand years ago and posited that the first doubling came in about 1600 (I think) and that successive doublings have been getting closer together so we’ve now reached the point where it happens once a year. Following this exponential curve we can suppose that we’ll reach a point where we get doublings every hour.

Without artificial intelligence we’re getting a ramping up of technological development through the Internet. Scientist, technicians and engineers can now communicate instantly, all over the world, which is certainly accelerating things. Ideas can propagate worldwide as fast as someone can type. Admittedly this can also apply to silly ideas following the axiom that a lie can circle the world faster than the truth can get its boots on, but silly ideas can also be torn apart quickly because a lot of brains are at work – the stupidity of crowds is countered by the synergetic intelligence of the Internet (a kind of artificial intelligence, if you like).

But putting all this aside I began pondering on how often now I keep getting those, ‘Hang on a minute’ moments. I love reading the kind of stuff that can be found on The Next Big Future, just as I enjoyed reading about them in science magazines a few decades ago. But my wish is to see these wonderful things actually reaching people and more and more now I’m seeing it happening. Yes, we have the Internet, all those mobile phones and all that instantly accessible data; all that computing power, music, graphics and games. But where’s my robot butler? Where are the physical as opposed to media/communication advances? Where is the hardware that does more than just shuffle about information and actually uses it in the physical world? Deep Blue might have beaten Kasparov at chess, but was incapable of moving its own pieces.

Some car adverts spring to mind. We have the cars that don’t need keys, use voice recognition, can recognize traffic signs and can park themselves. This is quite stunning for someone whose first car was a Vauxhall Viva loaded with filler and driven to the scrapyard after three months. This springs to mind. I used to run and program a big CNC milling machine, which was cool, but now it seems the technology is being developed to ‘print’ solid objects. How long, I wonder, before we’ll be able buy something similar to connect up to a home pc? Then there’s exponential increase in the speed DNA is being sequenced…

These are just a few of those developments, which I expect we’ll be seeing more of, where the virtual is becoming actual; where information technology is reaching out into the real world. I could spend days on the Internet finding more examples; where the computers are actually being given ‘hands’, but I won’t.

Can you think of some more?

Website Updates

I decided a number of days ago to put some extras on the website but for three or four days have been unable to upload anything. No explanations from Virgin - I suspect they were either overloaded or doing some maintenance.

I've now added a my SFF collection to Galleries and the 'scooby' ending on Gridlinked (this latter was an ending that was taken out during the editorial stages of the book because it was too much like a Scooby-Doo explanation).

Even with all the additions the website is only 11.4 megabytes so I will keep adding to it as time goes on. Any suggestions as to what you might like to see there?

Some Tech for the Girls

Or, being an equal opportunities blog, maybe for some of the boys too.

I just noticed Caroline putting on some nail varnish, which she acquired via Amazon. One coat goes on thinly and is allowed to dry, then next coat goes on thick and you hold the magnet over it.

I was reminded of a scene in Total Recall when a receptionist, in the office of the company selling those holiday experiences, was touching some kind of stylus to her nails and instantly changing their colour. I wonder how long it will be before that is a reality? See, advancing technology (well, innovation) is not all about I-phones, E-readers and and how big your RAM happens to be.

Nostalgia Trip.

After putting up that clip of the coming John Carter of Mars film, and then searching for the cover of the first of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books I got hold of, I’ve been pondering on the first SFF books I read. When I do interviews, I often chunter on about first having my mind distorted by E. C. Tubb’s Earl Dumarest saga, but maybe I chose that simply because of its connection to the first bit of creative writing I did in school (wholly derivative stuff about people having their brains removed). But I wonder which book was the first.

There are a few contenders. I know that the first E. C. Tubb book I read was The Winds of Gath. However, did I read that before one of the books my mother – a school teacher – was reading to her kids and kept at home: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. As an aside here I should mention that the second bit of SF I attempted to write, as a teenager, was something called The Crab, the Serpent and the Carpenter … shortly after something called The Planet of the Light Creatures, with drawings.

I also remember my first visit to a library and, when asked by mother what I would like to read, I mentioned that I had enjoyed a story a school teacher had been reading to my class. Knowing the author she directed me to the relevant shelf. The story mention was The Hobbit, and the book I picked up was The Two Towers by Mr Tolkein. But was I already reading the previously mentioned books before that.

Then we get back to John Carter. I picked up A Princess of Mars out of my brother Martin’s collection of books (mostly Louis L’Amour cowboy books), but was I already reading the skiffy stuff then? I don’t know … had I by then started picking up those Robert E. Howard Conan books? And how long was it before I started in on Larry Niven and my first taste of Ringworld Engineers?

Snow in the Desert

Here's another Christmas read for anyone who is interested.

Short Reads, which were first launched for Christmas 2010, are designed to be eye-catching titles at a low price that enable new ebook device owners to sample some of the best Pan Mac writers when they are hunting around for something to read on Boxing Day.

The 2011 list, with each ebook retailing at 99p, comprises three new titles from three bestselling Pan Macmillan writers – Christmas is for the Kids by Peter James (who has already had huge success with The Perfect Murder ebook, which was in the Top 10 chart in iBooks for much of 2010 and has been in the Top 100 consistently since), Three and a Half Deaths by Emma Donoghue and Bedlam by Andrew Lane. Also now available as Short Reads are Minette Walters’ Chickenfeed, Neal Asher’s Snow in the Desert and Water from the Sun and Discovering Japan by Bret Easton Ellis.

It can be found on Amazon Kindle here.

John Carter (2012) Trailer 2 HD 1080p

Okay. I watched one trailer and wasn't convinced, but seeing this one I now know I've got to see this. I think John Carter of (on?) Mars was about one of the first SFF books I ever read. It was the big four-armed green bugger on the cover that attracted my attention.

Update:

I was looking round for the cover picture of 'John Carter of Mars' which shows you how your memory plays tricks with you. The first of these books I read was 'A Princess of Mars'.

Vivisepulture

Here we go. Andy Remic contacted me about maybe submitting a story to Vivisepulture. Now, I don't really have any Polity related short stories that haven't already been published somewhere, but I do still have a few nasties in my files, so I sent him one called Plastipak. You'll find the kindle version here. I'm told:

The official release date is 20^th December, and the antho will be going out for the special Christmas price of £0.99p (to try and get it up those Amazon charts!!). On 26^th December it will revert to £1.99.

                                  Edited by Andy Remic and Wayne Simmons

Welcome to our anthology, a collection of weird and bizarre tales of twisted imagination by Neal Asher, Tony Ballantyne, Eric Brown, Richard Ford, Ian Graham, Lee Harris, Colin Harvey, Vincent Holland-Keen, James Lovegrove, Gary McMahon, Stan Nicholls, Andy Remic, Jordan Reyne, Ian Sales, Steven Savile, Wayne Simmons, Guy N. Smith, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Jeffrey Thomas, Danie Ware, Ian Watson and Ian Whates. Artwork by Vincent Chong.

The anthology is dedicated to the late Colin Harvey, with great affection.

In the tradition of Poe, Kafka, Borges and H. G. Wells, this collection of weird stories are written with the primary drive of presenting twisted deviations of normality. Whether it's the deviant factory workers of Neal Asher's Plastipak™ Limited, the pus-oozing anti-cherub of Ian Graham's Rotten Cupid, the acid-snot disgorging freak of Andy Remic's SNOT, or Ian Watson's alternate zombie-crucifixion, each story will drag your organs up through your oesophagus and give your brain a chilli-fired beating.

• WEIRD TALES

• DISTURBING CONCEPTS

• DEVIATED BLACK HUMOUR

• NO GENRE LEFT UNGOUGED

Vivisepulture is an EBOOK original anthology edited by Andy Remic and Wayne Simmons. Vivisepulture can be purchased from www.anarchy-books.com in PDF, EBOOK and MOBI formats.

EPUB versions can also be read on your PC/MAC by installing Adobe’s Digital Editions for free. Check out: www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/

www.anarchy-books.com

Names

So I think to myself I’ll call the main character David Spear (second name chosen because of that cool character in Band of Brothers) then I wonder: haven’t I used David before? Of course I have – David McCrooger in Hilldiggers – so I need a rethink. In a piece I wrote off the cuff, prior to starting Penny Royal, I used a Scandinavian name and, glancing at it again, I thought yes, something like that. The first one to pop into my head was Thorvald, and I decided to do a search on it. Now, bearing in mind that this is about the black AI Penny Royal, a monster (sort of), it was interesting to come up with this is relation to the name Thorvald:

Thorvald the slayer of Nidhogg

Then a search of Nidhogg comes up with:

In Norse myth, Nidhogg ("tearer of corpses") is a monstrous serpent that gnaws almost perpetually at the deepest root of the World Tree Yggdrasil, threatening to destroy it.

Also:

(Malice Striker, often anglicized Nidhogg)

And thus the imagination feeds.

Penny Royal

I think I can say firmly that I have now started Penny Royal (or Pennyroyal – I still haven’t decided). A week or so back I started making some notes, but then got distracted by my old website and reworked that. (Incidentally, if you haven’t noticed there are galleries and a forum there so, as far as the latter is concerned, if you have something you want to say that you feel is off-topic, pop over there.)

Yesterday, however, I sat down determined to get back on track and wrote my first 2,000 words. It’s nice to know when I’ve actually started a book. Checking my journals I see that I’ve always noted when I’ve finished one, or rather, finished the draft I send off to the publisher, but the start point has always been vague. Maybe after this one I’ll have a definite maybe answer to that perennial question, ‘How long does it take you to write a book?’

So, the state of play at the moment is this: Zero Point is at the publisher and I’ll soon be seeing it again to deal with the copy edits; Jupiter War is slowly fermenting on my computer and I’ll give it another try next year, to see if the taste has improved and what additives might be required; and my idea about doing some short stories is on hold for the moment. That’s all for now – I must get back to work.

Whatever?

John Scalzi has asked those who read his site what they prefer reading about so, never being one to be shy of nicking a good idea... What have you enjoyed reading about and found interesting here? And what bugs you?

Let me know in the comments below...

The Quantum Thief -- Hannu Rajaniemi

In a way this was more like a fast tour of the post singularity world rather than a story set in it. I’ve been reading science and science fiction for a very long time, but I often felt the need to hold up a finger and say, ‘Hang on Hannu, if you could explain –’ … but no, he’s gone like a tour guide on speed. The ideas hit you like cars in a motorway pile-up giving you no time to deal with them, absorb them. And, of course, while the ideas are hitting you like that you’re not properly processing the plot and can fail to engage with it. My feeling is that before he leapt through the next q-dot membrane to begin his next adventure in some gaming virtuality he needed an editor to catch hold of his collar and force him to stop and smell the roses, even if those roses were laced with an optogenetic virus.

Now for the however... This was all very enjoyable, bubbling with fascinating technology and its resultant life-styles, and a book that really does feel like a glimpse into a post Vingean singularity world. I found myself caught up in the author’s enthusiasm with it all and by the end of it wondered if someone has slipped amphetamines into the printer’s ink. For me it is a book I would like to read again, but with the Internet running so I can track down and nail all that glorious weirdness. And in the end, just like with the previous book I reviewed here, the answers to the questions are mostly 'yes'.   

The Lost Fleet 'Dauntless' -- Jack Campbell

There’s a whiff of antiquity about this book that reminds me of E.E. Doc Smith and other books I read at about the same time I read the Skylark series. This feels like WWII but with space ships and could easily have been written in the 50s. I felt momentary cringes at the name of the character ‘Black Jack Geary’ at the use of ‘hell lances’ and ‘grape shot’ and at crewmen being called ‘sailors’. The technology felt daft, as if the electronics aboard the ships might have employed thermionic valves, as if the corridors were full of steam pipes and the gunners were hand-loading shells. I half expected someone to pull out a slide rule at some point to calculate vectors.

 

However…

Why shouldn’t a beam weapon be called a ‘hell-lance’ and why shouldn’t ‘grape shot’ fired at relativistic speeds be perfectly acceptable? How different is the former to a maser or particle beam, and how different is the latter to rail-gun missiles? And why shouldn’t the kind of command structures seen in our navies be used? Such arguments I tried on myself as I devoured this book. What retired naval officer John G Hemry (his real name) has done here is combine his experience of military service with an obvious (and probably dated) love of science fiction.

To sum up: all of the above is true, but in reviewing a book I have to ask some very simple questions. Did I care about the characters? Did I want to know what happened next? Did I enjoy reading this book? Was it a good read? Will I buy the next book in the series?

The answer to all these questions is ‘yes’, and this book must be included in that long list called ‘guilty pleasures’.   

Website.

Right, I've stuck a forum up on my website here. Why not pay it a visit (all you IT buggers) and let me know what I'm doing wrong. I'm sure there'll be something...

Oh, and as I mentioned in one of my previous comments, I've now added a Galleries Page.

Go Completely Digital?

Here's an email I recently received. Perhaps those visiting here would like to address some of his points? I do have some answers, but let's see what others have got to say....


You should put a section on your blog so people can raise questions without resorting to emailing.

This is a question that's been annoying me for a while. I grew up with books and with tapes, then CD's then crappy windows media player and now all my music's on a 300Gb hard drive as well as every important (and unimportant) photo from my life.

I feel good that all my music's accessible this way and I've binned, or sold all my old CD's. That was easy.

I also threw all my books prior to 5 years ago away, which at the time seemed good but now is a niggling regret. Mainly because my daughter has just started reading ravenously and a lot of the stuff I had she'd love (she got into fantasy via Harry Potter!)

Should we throw away books in favour of digital text? I'd love to think this is progress but most of the writing I've discovered is through browsing bookshops. I buy books from Amazon from time to time
but I don't ever discover anything via that. Discovery's are always made in bookshops, be it from a cover or a few first pages etc... I have never found that from a web based system.

I bought a beautifully bound and illustrated edition of "the secret garden" for my daughter as well as a new edition of Philip Pullman's "Northern lights" Which I know she'll enjoy (she's 7 I can't subject
her to the wonders of masada yet)

A year ago I had this conversation with my partner while considering buying an e-reader. She was horrified that I'd consider sending our books the way of our CD's and at the time I thought that was
ridiculous however now I'm wondering how people will find new fiction without bookshops? I'm happy that I can access medical journals for work instantly and without wasting tons of paper a year plus emissions related to moving articles to me only 5% of which I want to keep and I don't know how I'd work without Zotero to catalogue my articles now but I just can't get comfortable with the loss of bookshops.

Sci-fi never really touches this, writers always just seem to accept that all information is always permanently available at minimal cost to anyone who want's it but never get into how people might access fiction or even look for it? The only time I've heard mention of libraries properly is Ian Banks in "The Algebraist" where the dwellers keep vast uncatalogued libraries stretching back millennia and
further.
Is the future just a library of information where fiction is controlled only by corporations such as Apple and Amazon who "Recommend" the fiction they know you'd like (scary). Or is it vast
quantities of fiction churned out by anyone who feels they can be an author dumped into a huge repository where no one can discover anything of quality? Either way it looks pretty shit for my children or grandchildren.

Sci-fi seems to be comfortable with future tech but lacks depth in social problems. Do you think someone should try writing from that angle?

Kind regards

Marcus

Prador!

From Andy Plumbly:

They're terrified on Masterchef now.

Poster

I found this while sorting through my files. I'm sure I was told not to put it up until it was used, then forgot about it. Nice bit of ego inflation:

Updated Website

Okay, for all you techy minded IT guys. I've rebuilt my website using the program Webplus X4. I still need to do a lot more work on it. A lot isn't displaying as well as it should, it could do with navigation bars and I've yet to make the 'video clip' page.

You can find it here.

Jain Tech on the Way

I love it when a rush of articles like this appear on TheNext Big Future. Here we have a microscopic engine:

"We've developed the world's smallest steam engine, or to be more precise the smallest Stirling engine, and found that the machine really does perform work,"

Here we have further efforts at miniaturization using carbon nano-tubes:

Three dimensional integration is a hot field within electronics since it offers a new way to package components densely and thus build tiny, well-functioning units. When stacking chips vertically, the most effective way to interconnect them is with electrical interconnects that go through the chip (instead of being wired together at the edges) – what are known as through-silicon vias.

Here we have nano-springs:

In order to exploit the particular material properties that appear at the nanoscale, it is first necessary to fabricate materials with nanoscale structures in a controlled and repeatable fashion. Reliable methods for the fabrication of simple shapes such as nanorods, nanocubes and nanotubes are now available, but more complex shapes still pose a challenge. Sungho Park and co-workers from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea have now reported a promising method for the synthesis of palladium nanosprings.

Quantum entangled photons:

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei in collaboration with colleagues in Germany and Austria have now demonstrated a system that allows photons to be entangled and stored in a manner suitable for quantum computing.

And photonic chips for quantum processors:

A multi-purpose optical chip which generates, manipulates and measures entanglement and mixture - two quantum phenomena which are essential driving forces for tomorrow's quantum computers - has been developed by researchers from the University of Bristol's Centre for Quantum Photonics. This work represents an important step forward in the race to develop a quantum computer.

Of course with steady developments like this we might end up with some sort of self-replicating technology that grows like a plant, or a fungal mycelia…