Art Competition (ReConditioned??)

I going to start a new art competition very soon. Any suggestions on how to run it? Like where pictures can be uploaded to and the like? I don't want to publish my email (though anyone with a bit of common sense should be able to work it out) and I don't want to lose track of what is submitted. Ideas please!

Oh and

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Vaude Part II

Here's some more of Vaude's collection:

Vaude's Collection.

Now what do we have here ... some seriously antique Edgar Rice Burroughs certainly:

Buzz Aldrin

On Facebook I got a message from one Geoffrey Utley, Yorkshire man who moved to Texas in 1979 for 2 years and stayed there. I found it fascinating, and maybe you will too:

Do you have a scientific background? The the science in your books seems "plausible" by the way. I was on a flight from NYC to Dallas the other day and Buzz Aldrin was sitting across from me in First Class. That was a huge thrill. I was re-reading Gridlinked at the time, and I thought about the beginning of space travel to a possible future. (I was reading it on a Kindle!)

My reply to that was:

Hi Geoffrey,
No I don't have a scientific background. The nearest I've come to it in my career was a proper job in engineering. I was raised by a father who was a lecturer in applied mathematics and a schoolteacher mother, so grew up with microscopes, chemistry sets etc, and the best thing any parent can teach a child: how to think, be analytical, and a love of learning. Everything else comes from my heavy science fiction and science reading, and an undiminished interest in both.

I also asked him if I could copy his comments to here and was just going to leave it at the one. However, I like this next bit too:

"Returning from the NE Regional Meeting, flying from LaGuardia , NY, I found myself sitting across the aisle from Buzz Aldrin and his wife. There may be a couple of you who have to "google" his name. To me, it was the equivalent of being in proximity to Mickey Mantle, or Muhammmed Ali.

Buzz Aldrin was the second human being to step foot on the Moon. Along with many other honors, he and the other crewmen were given a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I thought to myself, he was second, so is that like a silver medal in the Olympics, or only winning $100 million in the lottery instead of $250 million? Of course not, he and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon at the same time, but Armstrong as the commander was ordered by NASA to be the first.

I remembered going to my friend's house in the summer of 1969 in Yorkshire, England . I was not old enough to drive, so I was allowed by my parents to ride my 5 speed to my friend Phil's house to watch the lunar landing. This was unusual because when they landed, it was primetime in the USA , but about 4am in England. All the usual rules were suspended about riding my bike in the dark, and streets that were usually deserted had life and light.

We watched the fuzzy images on a black and white television, listening to England's equivalent to Walter Cronkite, Richard Dimbleby. We heard the "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," and were still not able to relax, because of course, they had to come home. "Home," being the Earth.

I keep stealing glances across the aisle, to watch an immaculately dressed man, looking like the retired CEO of a Fortune 100 company. I noticed he wore two very expensive looking wrist watches on his left and right wrists and wondered what time he kept them set-on. Eastern and Lunar maybe? The Captain and the First officer came out of the cockpit, (at separate times), to shake his hand, as discreetly as possible. I thought about the chances that 41 years after the fact, I was sitting close to the man I had seen step foot on our closest neighbour in the solar system. I thought about the fact that the device I'm typing this on had more computing power than a combination of all the computers on all the Moon missions' vehicles. I thought about the bravery of his wife, who had to watch and wait.

I thought about the challenges we have in front of us and how insignificant they are compared to what they achieved with slide rules and graph paper."

Damned right. And, really, how did we lose our way?

Green Man Review.

Cat Eldridge over at Green Man Review certainly seems to have enjoyed Orbus:

Now imagine fighting a Prador armed to, errr, its mandibles. Not a pleasant idea is it? It gets worse. Without giving away anything (or at least not too much), consider that there is something even worse than the strongest Prador. Much worse. And that being is manipulating the entire Prador race here in an attempt to make sure what that being wants to happen will happen. Throw in extremely deadly military hardware that can literally destroy planets if need be, thousand year-old post-humans who are perhaps more alien than the Prador are, and a well-armed military drone with its own agenda. This ain't state of the art space opera of thirty years ago, or even a decade ago -- it's perhaps the best space opera I've ever read, and that's saying a lot as I've read space opera for over thirty years now.

Thanks Cat!

Neal Asher Video Clip (2) 20/12/09

Here's the second half.

Neal Asher Video Clip (1) 20/12/09

Ah, I've managed to divide the video clip into two. Here's the first part.

Video Clip

Bugger, only after attempting to upload it to You Tube did I find out that clips are limited to 10 minutes on there. Now trying to find out how to edit it...

Czech Interview

Here's an old interview I did for a Czech magazine or website (can't remember which).

1. You started to write more than 20 years ago, but till 2001 you published only short stories in small press magazines or novellas in rather obscure publishing houses. Since 2001 – and Gridlinked – you have published a new novel every year and now you are in the process of writing the 7th novel. Can you explain the turning point? What has changed more: you and your style or the audience?

I reached my present position by climbing the writing ladder one rung at a time with people stepping on my fingers. I wasn’t published at all for many years, then I had a few short stories published, advanced to novellas and collections and finally to Macmillan. About twenty years ago I completed a fantasy novel and ever after I was sending synopses and sample chapters to large publishers (and writing more books). The turning point was a combination of luck and the skills I’ve learnt. By the time I sent a synopsis to Macmillan there had been a resurgence of interest in science fiction, I had attained a fairly high level of professionalism, and when I sent in my synopsis it was accompanied by excellent reviews of my small press work. The timing was just right, since Peter Lavery at Macmillan was looking for SF & fantasy writers to increase his list. Perhaps a review of The Engineer from the national magazine SFX, which I put on top of they synopsis and sample chapters (of Gridlinked) helped, as did the website I had created which put on display all my other work.

I reckon they continue offering me contracts is because I have learned how to produce and keep on producing, and because my stuff sells. Gridlinked was 65,000 words long when I first submitted it and I extended it to 135,000 in a couple of months (they were worried about this, but upon reading it decided the new version was better than the old); I did the same thing with The Skinner; and all my other books have been submitted early.

Why does my work sell? I suspect the readership has always been there, but that publishers go through fashions. In the 70s and 80s the fashion was for horror, big fantasy, and that the only SF available was dismal dystopian crap. Maybe it’s simply the case that new technologies have brought down the cost of smaller print runs and publishers can now afford to cater for niche markets.

2. You use quite a lot of violence in your books. Or perhaps I should say it better this way: You are able to make up amazing, hard-to-beat- villains and monsters. Where do you find the inspiration for them? Have you read – and enjoyed – Harry Harrison's Deathworld series?

I did read and enjoy Harry Harrison’s Deathworld series (in fact the man himself asked me that), but as I say in the acknowledgements in The Skinner: ‘Thanks to all those excellent people whose names stretch from Aldiss to Zelazny’. In my early teens I started off with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, E C Tubb, C S Lewis and have been an SF and fantasy junky ever since, which is not to say that’s all I read. Maybe my characters are inspired by the many thousands of books I’ve read, the films I’ve watched – I could never say for certain. As for my monsters: I’ve always had a great fascination for biology (present and prehistoric) and for monsters in general (I was drawing them as a child at school while everyone else was drawing flowers in plantpots). I always try to make my monsters biologically plausible and create an ecology into which they fit – it’s all part of the enjoyable world-building aspect of SF.

3. Most of your novels take place in one universe, invented by you. The Czech readers have their first chance to disclose this universe in The Skinner, your second novel. What can they expect to find?

To the Line planet Spatterjay come three travellers: Janer brings the eyes of a Hive mind; Erlin comes to find Ambel – the ancient sea captain who can teach her to live; and Sable Keech is a man with a vendetta he will not give up, though he has been dead for seven hundred years.

The world is mostly ocean, where all but a few visitors from the Human Polity remain safely in the island Dome. Outside, the native quasi-immortal hoopers risk the voracious appetite of the planet’s fauna. Somewhere out there is Spatterjay Hoop himself, and monitor Keech will not rest until he can bring this legendary renegade to justice - for hideous crimes commited centuries ago during the Prador Wars.

Keech does not know is that while Hoop's body roams free on an island wilderness, his living head is confined in a box on board one of the old captain's ships. Janer, the eternal tourist, is bewildered by this place where sails speak and the people just will not die, but his bewilderment turns to anger when he learns the agenda of the Hive mind. Erlin thinks she has all the time she will ever need to find the answers she requires, and could not be more wrong. And so these three travel and search, not knowing that one of the brutal Prador is about to pay a surreptitious visit, intent on exterminating witnesses to wartime atrocities, nor do they know how terrible is the price of immortality on Spatterjay.

As the fortunes of the recent arrivals unwittingly converge, a major hell is about to erupt in this chaotic waterscape ... where minor hell is already a remorseless fact of everyday life – and death.

4. Your books from the Polity universe have two main characters, a monitor Sable Keech and an agent Ian Cormac. They are both the good guys, fighting for ESC. Is it possible for them to meet in some of your works? And on the same side?

I’ve recently been working out the chronology of my books and what you say is entirely possible. Sable Keech is killed then reified about seventy-five years before the events of Gridlinked. The events of The Skinner then take place seven hundred years after his death. This basically means that Keech, reified (a high-tech zombie), is about in the Polity universe while the events in Gridlinked and subsequent Cormac books take place. Also, if Cormac survives his present trials, he may meet up with Keech some time in the future. Remember, these people do not die of old age!

5. You are considered to be one of the writers of so called New Space Opera, which – in my opinion – succeeded in giving a new push, new blood, to the SF genre, at least in the 1st decade of the new millenium. Can you compare the original space opera and the new one?

Nothing gets out of date quite so fast as science fiction, simply because it has to keep up with, and look ahead of, current science and technology (how many of those old writers predicted the personal computer, the Internet?). I read stuff like E E Doc Smith’s Skylark of Space series and enjoyed it thoroughly at the time, but now, picking up books like that and reading about an astrogator working something out on a slide rule just kills that ‘suspension of disbelief’ on which all space opera (and all SF) depends. I also think many of the older space operas were written in a time of greater naivety too. The characters and storylines now possess a harder edge; a greater understanding on the part of the author of how human beings, political systems, ecologies and much else actually operate. I now only read the old stuff out of nostalgia, and admiration of the story-telling skills of the writer concerned.

6. One of the most influential NSO writers seems to be Alastair Reynolds, whose novels started to be published one year sooner than yours. You use some similar methods and properties, such as "melding plague" and "nanomycelium". Has it ever happen that some reviever used these similarities against you?

I briefly talked to Alastair Reynolds about this. I’d written my first three books before I even picked up one of his (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I think it comes down to the fact that some ideas have their time. All SF is built upon what went before and what is currently being explored by scientists. Ideas concerning nanotechnology have been knocking around for decades and many SF writers are picking them up and using them. It is unsurprising that, as a result, those writers will come up with scenarios similar to each other’s. Though I think I’m right in saying that, because of my biological interests (specifically in fungi) I was probably the first to come up with nanomycelia. No reviewers have yet accused me of plagiarism. I’m not too bothered if they do because I can always prove them wrong. Jain technology, for example, appeared in my short story collection The Engineer in 1998, and my first nanomycelium story appeared in a magazine called Premonitions in 1992.

7. In the Line of Polity, your third novel, the force of evil is theocracy. Other than that, you do not use religion in your books too much. Was there some other reason for it except the one that you just needed some bad guys?

I take the view that as individual knowledge and access to information increases, primitive belief systems will continue to collapse. I don’t see how our beliefs in parochial gods will survive us encountering, in the future, the vastness of space and the further revelations of science. The Theocracy was a one-off created by special circumstances. And yes: I needed some bad guys.

8. On your webpage you posted samples of your fantasy novels – unpublished yet – that you wrote some years ago. Have you some plans with them? Do you think they may be interesting for the Czech readers?

One day I intend to rewrite those fantasy novels and offer them for publication, but at present I’m heavily involved in the Polity universe and will keep on writing novels set in it while Macmillan continues offering me contracts. I like to think the fantasy novels would be of interest to many readers and did want to give myself a breathing space so I could turn my attention to them, to a contemporary novel I wrote some time ago, to my TV scripts, but that seems increasingly unlikely. One book a year for Macmillan may soon be changing to one book every nine months, I’ve got short stories and novellas I need to write because I already have a market for them ... so much to do and so little time.

Interviews

Here's an interview with me over at The Book Depository.

Here's another one over at Next Read.

There was another one I did recently but I can't find it. These things tend to get a little samey anyway.

C is Cherryh and Clarke

And another one with a books missing. Where the hell is my copy of Wyrms by Orson Scott Card? I think that's probably the best book of his I've read.

ORSON SCOTT CARD	ENDER’S GAME – SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD .
JACK L CHALKER	EXILES AT THE WELL OF SOULS QUEST FOR THE WELL OF SOULS THE RETURN OF NATHAN BRAZIL TWILIGHT AT THE WELL OF SOULS MIDNIGHT AT THE WELL OF SOULS
C J CHERRYH	HESTIA EXILE’S GATE THE CHRONICLES OF MORGAINE SUNFALL FORTY THOUSAND AT GEHENNA MERCHANTER’S LUCK ANGEL WITH SWORD THE FADED SUN (TRILOGY) VOYAGER IN NIGHT PORT ETERNITY THE PALADIN
ARTHUR C CLARKE	IMPERIAL EARTH REACH FOR TOMORROW EARTHLIGHT THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE CHILDHOOD’S END THE DEEP RANGE
HAL CLEMENT	MISSION OF GRAVITY
JAMES COULTRANE	TALON
D G COMPTON	THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE CHRONICULES
MICHAEL CONEY	BRONTOMEK

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) - 9/12

One of the best scenes in a science fiction film ever.

Slingers

Now this looks like it has possibilities -- sent to me by Phil Edwards over at Live for Films. Check out Phil's interview with the writer Mike Sizemore.


Slingers is set in the year 2960 A.D., following mankind’s first interplanetary war. Humanity is now clustered into a finite, but still vast section of the universe known as Enclosed Space. Humanity won the war with an aggressive alien enemy, but at a cost. The way back to Earth is now cut off by an impassable barrier – a side effect of the blast that finally pushed the enemy back.

Sunshine

With a growing feeling of disappointment I watched Sunshine last night. Certainly there were some superb effects, though with a distinctly Kubrik 2001 retro feel, but that was about all. I somewhat doubt that the crew would have been the best choice to save the entire human race, but was prepared to let that go. I couldn’t, however, sufficiently suspend disbelief to accept a fusion bomb the ‘size of Manhattan Island’ would boost the sun’s output. The sun is a massive fusion reaction and dropping such a bomb would be equivalent to boosting a fire the size of Jupiter by dropping a lit match into it.

Other problems too: a guy caught out on the shield protecting the ship from the sun is burnt up in a tsunami of fire … erm what exactly was burning? The crew also began to run out of oxygen, apparently, whilst occupying a ship whose interior seemed the equivalent to a number of Albert Halls. Then, rather than continue a story of humans vs the hostile reality of space – which really could have worked – the whole thing lapsed into an Alien aping cop-out.

Really, there was no need to have a nutter creeping around offing the crew – the groundwork had already be laid for some serious moral quandaries and killings threafter. And really, adding camera distortions on top of film taken by a cameraman apparently suffering from delirium tremens adds nothing, just makes the whole viewing process irritating.

Here was a film that couldn’t make up its mind whether it was 2001 or Alien, and ended up being neither them, nor what it could have been.

Spaceship Two

Here, some more of that contemptible sci-fi nonsense turning into reality:




On Monday 7th December Virgin Galactic unveiled SpaceShipTwo to the world at Mojave Spaceport, California. 800 press, future astronauts and VIP guests gathered in the desert for a press conference and to view the roll out of the world’s first commercial spaceline.

Paradox

-->So, we have solar storms stirring up the sun and knocking out electrical equipment here on Earth; the MOD satellite set to watch this activity is downloading image files from the future, offering clues to future crimes or disasters; we have debates about predestination, about the consequences of tampering with the timeline; we have speculation about where this information is coming from, like via a black hole, or god, and all this is wrapped up in an exciting police procedural. But it’s not science fiction apparently, well, according to Tamzin Outhwaite:

"Initially I thought it was a sci-fi project. Then I read the script and realised it wasn't. It's about police officers trying to work out whether there is a worm hole between two time zones."

Ahem, a ‘worm-hole between two time zones’, need I go on? It’s always been fairly plain that many of the good people in the acting profession are a bit thick, but this one is right up there with a certain large comedienne’s statement, during a program about ‘the 100 best books’ that she doesn’t like science fiction, thereafter listing her favourites, like 1984. SFX notes that Tamzin Outhwaite ‘joins an esteemed list of actors in abject self-denial about appearing in sci-fi’ and doubtless David Langford will have something to say about this in his next Ansible (well-worth getting by email).

From my dictionary:

Paradox 1. a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement...

You gotta chuckle.

Science Fiction is Dying.

Interesting article here from Mark Charan Newton:

"There is no Schadenfreude; I take no pleasure in holding this viewpoint: the Science Fiction genre is dying.

Don’t spit your coffee at the computer screen just yet. I’m talking predominantly in terms of sales over time. I know all you belle-lettristic types don’t like to think about anything but Art, but units-shifted is a factor that matters. It is what shapes the literature industry."

I couldn't help but wonder how many similar articles came out at the time, some decades ago, when the shelves were seemingly wholly populated by horror books with generic black covers. So often I've heard the claim that science fiction is dying, or dead but, every time, an attempt to nail down the coffin lid fails.

Fantasy & Science Fiction

I'm currently reading The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction edited by Gordon Van Gelder and, thinking about this in connection with the books I've been sorting through in my loft, it's a bit of a nostalgia trip, because some of the stories are quite old. All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury is lyrical, enjoyable, but you can't help but titter a little at a depiction of Venus covered in jungle when we now know the reality. Later I read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which has to be somewhere up in the list of the best short stories I've ever read. It still chokes me up a little even after all this time.

But short stories. If anyone here wants to read some superb short SF stories, if there is one short story collection I would recommend way above any other, then that has to be Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I've mentioned it before - brilliant collection.

Some Bits...

Nice little review of The Gabble over here at the Falcata Times.

"No one does monsters better than Neal Asher, so be prepared to revisit the lives and lifestyles of such favourites as the gabbleduck and the hooder, to savour alien poisons, the walking dead, the Sea of Death, and the putrefactor symbiont."

And a very strange choice of title for a article/essay over here.

Margaret Atwood Steals The Bread From Neal Asher’s Mouth

I noted in the comments that I need to lose weight anyway???

B is Blish, Banks & Butler.

Here’s the ‘B’ section from my SFF collection. I’m a little bit annoyed upon having gone through this lot. One of my very favourite books is missing: Half-Past Human by T J Bass. Doubtless I loaned it to someone and that someone hasn’t bothered to return it.

IAIN M BANKS	CONSIDER PHLEBAS THE PLAYER OF GAMES INVERSIONS LOOK TO THE WINDWARD
CLIVE BARKER	WEAVEWORLD THE GREAT & SECRET SHOW
T J BASS	THE GODWHALE
BARRINGTON J BAYLEY	THE PILLARS OF ETERNITY & THE GARMENTS OF CAEN
GREG BEAR	SONGS OF EARTH & POWER QUEEN OF ANGELS THE FORGE OF GOD EON
BENFORD & BRIN	HEART OF THE COMET
JAMES BLISH	THE QUICUNX OF TIME JACK OF EAGLES THE WARRIORS OF DAY THE CLASH OF CYMBALS A CASE OF CONSCIENCE MIDSUMMER CENTURY FALLEN STAR EARTHMAN COME HOME ANYWHEN THE TESTAMENT OF ANDROS
BEN BOVA	COLONY VOYAGERS II VENGEANCE OF ORION KINSMAN AS ON A DARKLING PLAIN
MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY	THE SHATTERED CHAIN – DARKOVER LANDFALL THE SPELL SWORD THE WINDS OF DARKOVER STAR OF DANGER THE BLOODY SUN THE SWORD OF ALDONES
JOHN BRUNNER	THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME – THE TIDES OF TIME THE DRAMATURGES OF YAN
TOBIAS BUCKELLL	CRYSTAL RAIN
MARK BUDZ	CLADE
KENNETH BULMER	ON THE SYMB-SOCKET CIRCUIT TO OUTRUN DOOMSDAY
OCTAVIA BUTLER	MIND OF MY MIND – CLAY’S ARK IMAGO DAWN