It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

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Author Archives: iansales


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alt.fiction 2012

Last weekend was the sixth alt.fiction, and the first in a new venue in Leicester. I’ve been to every one so far. The first alt.fictions took place in the Assembly Rooms in Derby, which I quite liked as it’s a well-known piece of Brutalist architecture. After a couple of years, it moved across the Market Place to QUAD, a cinema and arts complex. This year, however, alt.fiction has moved somewhat further – all the way to the Phoenix Digital Arts Centre in Leicester.

The move to Leicester doubled the journey time by train for me, but it’s still much closer than many other UK cons. I took with me a suitcase filled with my remaining copies of Rocket Science, and a few dozen hardback and paperback editions of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Because of this, I took a taxi from the railway station to Phoenix Square, though it’s only a five-minute walk away. I arrived about eleven o’clock, so I missed the first item on the programme. (Some people had arrived in the city the evening before and stayed overnight.) As soon as I walked into the venue, I spotted Colum Paget and Iain Cairns, contributors to Rocket Science. (Later that evening, Craig Pay, another contributor, turned up.)

The day proved to be one of spotting people I knew, and saying hello but very little else. Some people I knew were present I never actually saw. I had several lengthy discussions, on topics as diverse as writing, science fiction and, er, programming methodologies. I didn’t make it to any of the programme items. So no change there. The dealers room, as at past alt.fictions, wasn’t very good. Terry Martin of Murky Depths had a table. And someone else was selling independent graphic novels. There was also a volunteer from Waterstone’s with a table full of paperbacks by alt.fiction’s guests. He kindly agreed to sell copies of Rocket Science and Adrift on the Sea of Rains. And he did a good job of it, too, selling most of the stock I’d given him.

I ate at Phoenix Square, and it was a pleasure to be able to say to the staff “no dairy”, and for them make no fuss over it and provide what I wanted in a dairy-free form. I hadn’t dared do that at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel during the Eastercon. I pretty much spent the entire day in the café/bar on the ground floor of Phoenix Square. In the evening, a large group of us went for a curry, which was much better than the one I’d had in Heathrow the weekend before. The restaurant was called, unsurprisingly, The Curry House. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel where we were all staying, the Ramada, and filled up the bar. I eventually went to bed about two am.

I’d enjoyed the curry, but I don’t think all of it agreed with me. I was fine when I woke up, and had the usual hearty hotel breakfast… Though I have to admit I think they’ve gone down in quality over the past few years. Somehow hotel chefs do something to fried eggs that makes them look and taste completely unappetising. I like fried eggs, I have one or two most Sundays. But those gelid primary-coloured things you see sitting in a bath of grease at hotel breakfast buffets bear only a passing resemblance to them. And the bacon… Do chefs have some philosophical objection to cooking it? Or do they get a kick from the thought of diners spending fruitless minutes trying to chew rubbery fat?

Anyway, by about eleven I was starting to feel ill, and I recognised the symptoms. Something I’d eaten had contained dairy. None of the meals I’d eaten had on previous occasions caused me any trouble… except I did have a tarka daal with my chicken saag and pilau rice in The Curry House. Perhaps there was ghee in the daal? I don’t know. I ordered a plate of chips for lunch in Phoenix Square, but I couldn’t eat it. I went outside a couple of times for some fresh air. I even went and sat in a programme item, to see if that would help. The panel was on “The Return of the Short Story”, which the panel members admitted was a misnomer as the short story had never gone away. I lasted about fifteen minutes before needing some more fresh air. I didn’t actually feel any better until I got to the railway station around quarter to two.

I’d only been there about twenty minutes when Ken MacLeod appeared on the platform. It seemed we were catching the same train, although he was getting off in Derby to catch a connecting train back to Scotland. I was staying on until the terminus in Sheffield. At Derby, Ken disembarked. When I reached Sheffield, I climbed the stairs from the platform… and saw Ken MacLeod looking somewhat lost. (He explained that his train had stopped for ten minutes in Sheffield, so he was looking for somewhere to buy a coffee.)

So that was alt.fiction #6. I like the new venue. There are less stairs than the QUAD, and the café/bar in the foyer is bigger and more pleasant. There was a terrace, but it was too cold to use it. Leicester city centre, or at least that portion where Phoenix Square is located, seemed curiously deserted throughout the entire weekend. So no marching brass band playing outside like last year’s alt.fiction in Derby. (Or drummers practicing in the room next to the bar as at a previous alt.fiction in the Assembly Rooms.) The hotel was modern and very pleasant, and conveniently close to Phoenix Square. It is, I think, an all together better venue for alt.fiction. I certainly plan to go next year.


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Advantage Amazon

I am, I suspect, like most people: I know that Amazon is a Big Bad Monopoly and famous for screwing over publishers, but, well, the books and DVDs they sell are competitively priced and the service is good and… So I buy from them. I even link books titles on this blog to my Amazon affiliates account – it currently earns me about £15 a year. (To be fair, I have always linked small press books directly to their own site, in order to better support them.) I’ve also tried selling books on Amazon Marketplace, but given that I have to price them so low to get sales, and that Amazon take off around £2.80 in fees, many of them I’ve sold at a loss. And I don’t mean a loss when factoring in their original purchase price. I mean, it cost me more to post the book than I received from the sale. But I didn’t much care – at least the books were no longer cluttering up my house.

But now the shoe is well and truly on the other foot.

Last month, I started up Whippleshield Books, a niche small press to publish literary hard sf. I did it partly to self-publish something I felt I needed more control over than another small press would give me. I also wanted it out quickly, so I could launch it on the back of Rocket Science at Olympus 2012 last weekend. Which I did. It’s called Adrift on the Sea of Rains.

I bought some ISBNs, and I paid to have the book professionally printed by MPG Biddles. Since the book has an ISBN – two, in fact, one for the paperback and one for the limited edition hardback – it appears in Nielsen’s database, and so was picked up by Amazon. Where the two editions were offered for pre-order.

But the product pages on Amazon were very basic, with only title, author, price, artwork, publisher, pagecount and ISBN. I decided to add a blurb and some reviews. I identified myself as the publisher, and filled in the necessary online form. It would take five days to update the product page, I was told. A day or two later, the book could no longer be pre-ordered; it was now marked “unavailable”. Thinking this might have been a consequence of my editing, I contacted Amazon.

They assured me it wasn’t, and said it was simply because they “did not have a relationship with the supplier”. Amazon suggested I join their Amazon Advantage programme. Now, I’d only edited one of the two editions of my book. The other could still be pre-ordered. The whole thing smelled to me, but never mind… I signed up for Amazon Advantage. It costs £23.50 a year. This was much better, I thought. I had much greater control over the product page. For the small annual fee, this seems okay.

Then Amazon ordered a copy of the paperback edition of Adrift on the Sea of Rains, and I discovered things weren’t so good after all.

Amazon take 60% of the retail price. This is non-negotiable. For a £3.99 paperback, this means I earn £1.60 per copy sold. Amazon take £2.39. And they’ll carry as much stock as they think they can sell, which in this case is a single copy.

The paperback of Adrift on the Sea of Rains costs me £1.32 per copy to print (not including one-off set-up costs, or the fixed cost of the ISBN). So that’s 28p profit per copy sold on Amazon. A bit small, but never mind. Except… I have to ship the order. I have to pay for the postage and packing. At the moment, that’s 20p for a padded envelope and 92p postage for second class large letter. My 28p profit has now become 84p lost. If I have to supply single copies to Amazon, then for each copy I will lose £0.84. If they order 100 copies one at a time, I will be £84 out of pocket. I may not be a businessman, but even I can see this is no way to run a business.

It was always my intention to set up a website of my own for Whippleshield Books, and I would sell copies there. But only a microscopic percentage of the people who visit Amazon were likely to visit my site. So selling on Amazon appeared a good move. And so it would have been. If they’d ordered 100 copies from me at £1.60 for stock, I’d have made £28 (less shipping, which would be less than £28). But since I might have to supply each individual order… it’s untenable.

I’m going to withdraw my Whippleshield Books from Amazon. I am going to stop using my Amazon affiliates account (I’ll leave the existing links on this blog; I don’t have time to go back and remove them all). I am going to pull my books from my Amazon Marketplace account. And I will look elsewhere to buy books and DVDs. Even if it costs me more. (That may result in me buying less, which can only be to the good.)

Having said that, I will be providing a Kindle edition of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. I have no choice in that – the platform is popular and it is the easiest way for Kindle owners to purchase the book. I can also make a profit on each sale. And I hope to have the Whippleshield Books website up and running in the two to three weeks.


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Sold lots, didn’t win award, am very hungover

The title of this post is the text of a, er, text I sent to a friend on the Monday morning of Olympus 2012, this year’s annual Eastercon in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow, London. The Eastercon is one of the major events in British science fiction, but this year’s was especially so for me as I was launching two books: the anthology Rocket Science, and my novella, Adrift on the Sea of Rains.

Mark Harding, Mutation Press supremo, arrived at my place on Thursday night with boxes of Rocket Science. He stayed overnight and the following morning, after making my Breakfast of Champions (Vegetarian Edition), we drove to Morrison’s to buy wine for the Rocket Science launch and comestibles to consume en route, and then headed onto the M1. The journey was relatively painless, though when we hit the M25, traffic ground to a halt. In fact, it took us an hour to travel the twenty miles along the M25 from the M1 to the M4. We reached the Radisson Edwardian Hotel around two-ish.

I checked in and registered, and headed up to my hotel room to dump my bag. I’d forgotten what a labyrinth the Radisson Edwardian is. It didn’t help that I used the wrong lifts and ended up having to walk a couple of miles to find my room. Then it was down to the bar to find any familiar faces. I spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between the bar and the dealers’ room. I bought beer, I bought books. I talked with old friends, I met new friends. This is what you do at a convention. I didn’t attend any programme items that day. I always tell myself I will, and then fail to do so.

Back in 2008, the main bar was called the Polo Lounge, but it has since been remodelled and renamed the Bijou Bar. It has silver wallpaper. It was like sitting inside a birthday present. The staff were slow and mostly useless, and the drinks were expensive. On the Friday afternoon, I saw Sarah Pinborough buy a large glass of wine… it cost her £11. On the Saturday night, I bought a friend a vodka and coke and that cost £9.75. The staff routinely put a 12.5% optional service charge on all drinks bought. One pint I was served in the Atrium Bar had too much of a head so I asked the barman to top it up. He poured the entire pint away and poured a new one into the glass.

On the Friday night, a large group of us headed to a nearby Indian restaurant. A table for fourteen had been booked, but we were three over that number. So those three sat at another table. They ordered their food, received it, ate it, paid and left… before the rest of us had even received our food. Because it took two hours, I ended up having to wolf down my chicken saag (creamed spinach, not leaf), and dashing back to the hotel for John Jarrold’s party. He had laid on wine, and since I hadn’t had time to get a beer for myself, I started drinking that.

Mistake.

At some point during the night – I think it was about four am, after I’d been asleep for several hours – I apparently took a wrong turn after coming out of my en suite bathroom. And found myself in the corridor. Wearing my pyjamas. So I had to walk down to reception and get a new keycard. The first one they gave me didn’t work, so I had to go back down again. Perhaps they did it deliberately.

The Saturday was better. I had a proper look round the dealers’ room, and bought a number of books. In the afternoon, I was on a panel, How Not To Suppress Women’s Writing, with Amy McCulloch, Tricia Sullivan, Penny Hill, and moderated by Juliet McKenna. The preparation Juliet had done was awesome. I thought the panel went well, and from comments afterwards I understand others did too.

Saturday night, a group of us went to the restaurant attached to the Pheasant Pub. What a bizarre place. It’s like someone’s attic, but constructed of lots of little mezzanines and staircases and platforms. Happily, the food is excellent, and the service was very good. Back at the hotel, we stayed in the bar and talked. I lasted until about one am before calling it a night. At one point, I was approached by Amanda Rutter, who admitted she’d undergone something of an epiphany that day and was keen to get involved with SF Mistressworks. Since she prefers fantasy more than science fiction, I suggested she start up a sister site covering that genre. And so she has – Fantasy Mistressworks. Later, Michaela Staton decided that more recent sf novels by women writers should not be forgotten. And so she’s set up Daughters of Prometheus, a blog for reviews of twenty-first century sf by women writers.

I did not lock myself out of my hotel room that night.

Sunday was my big day – the Rocket Science launch, and then a couple of hours later, moderating a panel about the anthology. Breakfast was a joke. They put people in a corner of the restaurant, and then waiters stood around doing nothing, preventing you from getting to the food or returning to your table.

I always feel like a fraud standing up in front of a room full of people and talking – especially after seeing Juliet McKenna moderate the How Not to Suppress Women’s Writing so superbly. Fortunately – or, on reflection, perhaps not – we had brought that wine. So I did my spiel, I mentioned the Guardian review, and then introduced the writers who were reading excerpts: Iain Cairns, Deborah Walker, David L Clements, CJ Paget, Stephen Gaskell and Martin Mc Grath. Nigel Brown was also present but not reading. Afterwards, there was a massive rush to the front and we sold – and signed – lots of copies. I’m rubbish at signing – my signature is different every time, and the only thing I could think to write was “Enjoy!” We later worked out we’d sold about eighty copies of Rocket Science throughout the weekend, and about half that of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. We’ve already put in a second order with the printers for more copies of Rocket Science.

At 3 pm, I moderated ‘The Science of Rocket Science’. I’d not done any preparation for it as I was hoping the other members of the panel would do all the work – David L Clements, Martin McGrath, Deborah Walker and Iain Cairns. Happily, they did. The panel went well, and several members of the audience came up to us afterwards to chat about the topics covered. We even sold some more copies of the book.

Unfortunately, because of those programme items – and the BSFA Awards at 6 pm – I didn’t get much opportunity to eat, and ended up having a small bowl of chips in the Bijou Bar. It wasn’t enough.

The less said about the BSFA Awards ceremony the better. It was like watching a slow motion car crash – just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. And then more so. Chris Priest’s acceptance speech after The Islanders won almost made up for it. (Given the response to Meaney’s presentation, I am somewhat mystified by the inclusion of Leviathan Wakes on the Hugo shortlist…)

I was disappointed SF Mistressworks didn’t win, but I’d been pretty sure the SF Encyclopedia would take the award anyway. And so it did. Afterwards, I stayed in the Atrium Bar (mostly) talking to people and having a good time. A group of us did go to the panel on steampunk and colonialism, but I found it disappointing. I spoke to someone afterwards who told me Nisi Shawl is currently working on a steampunk novel. I’m not a fan of the genre, but from the description given her book did sound really interesting.

I’m not going to name-check everyone I spoke to. I’m sure to miss some, for a variety of reasons. But the conversations were fun and interesting, though less centred around writing than I recall from other cons. I never quite felt on top form throughout the weekend, but I think I managed to get away with it on a few occasions.

My last experience of the Radisson Edwardian was not a happy one. I was there for the Eastercon in 2008, spent more money crossing London than I did getting to the city, and that spoiled my mood for the con. So much so, in fact, that I didn’t go when the Eastercon returned there in 2010. And I’d have stayed at home this year if it hadn’t been for the Rocket Science launch. But I went and, despite my dislike of the hotel, I had a good time. Probably too much of a good time. As Neil Williamson has said, it was like a normal Eastercon but turned up to 11. Too much of everything. Except food. I could have done with more food (but being lactose intolerant makes that more of  a problem than it should be).

Mark and I left on the Monday after lunch. The drive home took a little longer than expected as we encountered a monsoon on the M1. Happily, we survived it. Once we’d got to my flat, Mark decided to continue on up to his home in Scotland, rather than kip over as he had done on the way down to London.

Since I’d travelled to the Eastercon by car, I’d imagined I’d buy lots more books that usual. After all, I wouldn’t have to worry about carting them home on public transport. I ended up buying twenty, many of them hardbacks. I actually found it difficult to find stuff I really wanted, though it was one of the cheapest dealers’ rooms I can remember. Anyway, here is the complete haul:

These paperbacks are for review on SF Mistressworks: Time Future, Maxine McArthur; Extra(Ordinary) People, Joanna Russ; Passing for Human, Jody Scott; Islands, Marta Randall; Starshadows, Pamela Sargent; Star-Anchored, Star-Angered, Suzette Haden Elgin; and the first two books of Jo Clayton’s Diadem series, Diadem from the Stars and Lamarchos.

And these ones I’ll read and review for Daughters of Prometheus: Homecalling And Other Stories, Judith Merril; The Maquisarde and The Child Goddess by Louise Marley; and Watermind, MM Buckner.

Some paperbacks by male sf writers. Well, one hardback and some paperbacks. But the hardback was as cheap as a paperback. The Helix and the Sword by John C McLoughlin was recommended by someone on LibraryThing. Wildeblood’s Empire is the third of Brian Stableford’s Daedalus Mission sextet. And I’ve no idea why I keep on buying Sutton’s novels as they’re early 1960s trash sf – perhaps it’s the covers.

Some hardbacks. Justice City is for the Compton collection. Einstein’s Question actually has equations in it, though it’s a novel. I couldn’t resist it. As for Osama, well, if we don’t reward Lavie Tidhar for writing books like Osama, he’ll only write the steampunk ones. And I’ve been a fan of Ian Watson’s sf for years, so a new collection is always welcome.


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A little lunacy…

I did toy with the title “A taste of green cheese”, but fortunately good sense prevailed. Almost. Anyway, you’ve seen a photograph of the boxes containing it, you’ve seen its cover-art, and you’ve even seen the first review ever of it… So I thought I’d give you a little teaser of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Here are the first three paragraphs (and a relevant picture):

SOME DAYS, WHEN it feels like the end of the world yet again, Colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, goes out onto the surface and gazes up at what they have lost.

In the grey gunpowder dust, he stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. He leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on his back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes his arms out from his sides. And he stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. He listens to the whirr of the pumps, his own breath an amniotic sussurus within the confines of his helmet. The noises reassure him – sound itself he finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.

If he turns about – blurring bootprints which might otherwise last for millennia – he sees the blanket-like folds of mountains, grey upon grey, and a plain of the same lack of colour, all painted with scalpel-edged shadows. Over there, to his right, the scattered descent stages of LM Trucks and Augmented LMs fill the mare; and one, just one, still with its ascent stage. Another, he knows, is nearly twenty years old, a piece of abandoned history; but he does not know which one.

You’ll have to buy the book to read the rest of it. It will be on sale at Eastercon (6 – 9 April) and at alt.fiction (14 – 15 April). And I hope to have a website up within a couple of weeks where it can be purchased direct.


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Me @ Eastercon

As you are no doubt aware, the UK’s annual Eastercon – this year called Olympus 2012 – takes place this coming weekend at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel in Heathrow, London. Membership has apparently sold out. Fortunately, I bought mine several months ago.

I won’t be at Olympus 2012 just to launch Rocket Science, however. Or my novella, Adrift on the Sea of Rains. I’ll also be on a couple of panels. And, of course, I’ll be in the audience at the BSFA Awards ceremony, on hand in case SF Mistressworks actually wins the non-fiction award. Anyway, my schedule looks like this:

Saturday 7 April
5pm How Not to Suppress Women’s Writing, Royal B+C room
with Penny Hill, Amy McCulloch, Juliet E McKenna and Tricia Sullivan

Sunday 8 April
12pm (noon) Rocket Science launch, Room 12 (Tetworth)
several of the contributors will be present to read excerpts from their stories

3pm The Science of Rocket Science, Room 12 (Tetworth)
with Iain Cairns, David L Clements, Martin McGrath and Deborah Walker

For the rest of the convention, I shall either be wandering around the dealers’ room – probably trying to hunt down copies of The Women’s Press sf novels – or in the bar. Don’t forget to say hello.


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My first book!

So what if I published it myself. At least I did it properly. See:

That’s 100 paperback copies and 100 hardback copies of Whippleshield Books’ first, er, book: Apollo Quartet 1: Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Well, that’s what I ordered. There may be more, and sometimes the printers do over-run. It looks like more. But I won’t know the exact number until I actually count them.

Anyway, I’m really pleased with how it’s come out. Not bad for a first effort. The cover art is actually more effective than I’d expected:

Having said that, I’ve spotted a few things I’m not completely happy with, but… lessons learned. I shall make sure not to make the same mistakes when I come to publish the second book of the Apollo Quartet, Wave Fronts.

For now, I have 75 copies to number and sign before the Eastercon…

 


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Awards frenzy!

Wasn’t yesterday fun? The Clarke Award shortlist is announced on Tuesday to muted cries of disbelief: what, no By Light Alone? No Osama? No The Islanders? Sheri S Tepper? Are you serious? This is neither unusual nor unexpected. But then Christopher Priest comes crashing into the debate with a long and (mostly) well-argued rant that teeters throughout on the edge of madness and then at the end finally topples into lunacy. Kill the jury! They are incompetent! They didn’t pick the best books!

And now the Clarke Award is all over the newspapers, and even people in the US have actually heard of it.

Result.

This is a photo of China Miéville - because every piece on the Clarke Award or the state of British sf should be accompanied by a photo of China Miéville (source: guardian)

I remember back in the early 1990s when one publisher was so pissed off at the Clarke shortlist they boycotted the awards ceremony. Another year – it may even have been the same year – the “wrong” book won, and a publisher threatened to never submit any books ever again. It happens, it passes. We talk about it, we move on.

Which is not to say that sometimes awards do royally fuck up. Blackout / All Clear*, for instance. And many people, including myself, are somewhat disappointed with the 2012 Clarke Award shortlist. I didn’t think Embassytown belonged on it. Hull Zero Three I’ve heard mixed reports about. I’ve not heard anything good about The Waters Rising. Rule 34 is a loose sequel to Halting State, which has been sat unread on my book-shelves since I was given a free ARC of it at alt.fiction in 2008 (see here). Besides, I’ve worked in IT for twenty years, I’m a geek – and I hate geek fiction. I know nothing about The End Specialist, though the general consensus seems to be it’s pretty good and shows promise but isn’t exactly award-worthy. The Testament of Jessie Lamb I’ve read and it was the one title I guessed would be – and wanted to be – on the shortlist, so I’m pleased I got that right.

Of course, when teacup tempests like this occur, something is needed to calm the troubled, er, beverage. “It wasn’t a failure of process” is one. “The committee did exactly what they were charged with doing” is another. Both are valid. “It’s entirely subjective” is a third. It’s also complete bollocks. As Adam Roberts put it “aesthetic judgment is not an exact science”. But it’s certainly not an “entirely subjective” process. Otherwise we wouldn’t have literary sf vs every other type of sf. We wouldn’t even have classics of literature. Some books are objectively better than others. FACT.

The Clarke is a juried award, so it’s not a popularity contest. It doesn’t matter how nice the author of a book is; it should not influence the judges’ decision (see Cheryl Morgan here for mention of the different ways in which juried awards can work). Books don’t get on juried shortlists as rewards for long and well-regarded careers. Having said that, the Clarke is not just about the best science fiction novels published during the preceding year. It also tries to say something about the state of the genre in the UK. It’s a bloody great loud announcement in the genre conversation. (Which does make you wonder why they shortlisted a ten-year-old Tim Powers novel last year…) The Clarke shortlist does not just say, “here are the six best sf novels published last year” – because they are patently not. The shortlist also says something about what British science fiction is and should be. Whether we want to hear, or understand, that message is another matter entirely.

I certainly think that British science fiction appears to have smeared out into a spectrum with two extremes, at one end China Miéville and at the other Neal Asher. We have “literary” sf on the one side – Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, Gwyneth Jones, etc. On the other, the giant splodey spaceships school of sf – Gary Gibson, Michael Cobley, Stephen Baxter (mostly), Gavin Smith, Charles Stross, Paul McAuley, Al Reynolds… And everything spread out on a line in between. The more literary end has dominated the Clarke Award in recent years. The current shortlist shifts the balance a little back towards the core genre end.

It’s an argument worth making. I can’t claim to know what was going through the heads of the judges, I can only speculate given the six books they chose for the shortlist. Some of them are acquaintances, and I’m aware of their opinions on certain genre-related matters. But even then, I wouldn’t dream of speaking for them as I’m as likely to be completely wrong as I am anywhere near the truth. However, if their intention was to get people talking, then in that respect they have succeeded admirably.

One such conversation took place yesterday on Twitter between myself and Neil Williamson. He argued that entertainment was often under-valued when determining the quality of a book. I pointed out that good books should do more than just entertain – “a book that aims for a low target should not be praised for hitting it”. Bad books can also prove entertaining – the example I gave was the works of AE van Vogt, which are abysmal but I enjoy reading them. Neil responded that writers should be praised if their books are entertaining, and skilfully and deliberately so. And so forth. We agreed to agree. I don’t doubt that over the next few weeks – and especially in the bar at the Eastercon next weekend – the Clarke shortlist will spark off further discussions. Some of them may even reach a conclusion or two.

And then, of course, there is the awards ceremony, when the winner of the Clarke will be announced. They will, of course, pick the wrong book. That’s how it works. And then we can argue about it all over again…

Until next year.

(* Completely unrelated, but has no one noticed that choosing Blackout and All Clear as titles links them incorrectly? During WWII, the blackout was permanent, it did not signal the start of an air-raid. The “all clear” was sounded after an air raid had finished.)


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Attack this book!

The Fiction Desk has just announced that their new anthology, The Maginot Line, will be published on 7 April. This is important because it contains one of my stories. ‘Faith’ is another of my alternate Space Race stories, and was inspired by a very strange dream I had.

There are eight other stories in the anthology. So that’s nine very good reasons to buy a copy. You can pre-order it for £9.99 from here.


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Relevance? What’s that then?

It has been said that current science fiction is not especially relevant, if at all. It fails to address or comment on the concerns which face us on a daily basis. As we watch the world around us change for the worse, so science fiction fails to either document it, or perhaps chart a way out of it. When it does try to offer object lessons and thought experiments, they always lead to dystopias, while ignoring the fact that we’re already heading in that direction. We don’t need sf to tell us what can go wrong. We can see what’s going wrong in the world about us.

This is not true of all science fiction, of course. There are some sf writers who write about the world we know – Ken MacLeod, for example; or Bruce Sterling.

I have even tried to do the same myself, write stories about the abuses capitalism and the super-rich perpetrate upon everyone, stories about the climate, the economy… In ‘Human Resources’, I posited a world in which the free movement of labour followed the same rules as the free movement of capital, and described some of the ramifications of that. In ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’, I described a post-wealth world created by a billionaire’s catastrophic attempt to “fix” global warming. In ‘The Contributors’, I wrote about the effects on people when they’re treated as nothing more than dispensable components in an economic system.

But no one wanted my stories.

Two of them were published by M-Brane SF, after numerous rejections from other magazines. One I published myself here on my blog.

People want stories in which spaceships get blown up. They want stories about wars against humanised aliens… while in their daily newspapers the human enemy their armed forces are fighting are othered and demonised. They want stories about privileged heroes making their mark on the world around them. They want stories where violence – something which requires no talent or intelligence – solves seemingly intractable problems and makes lives better. They want simple solutions, not complicated problems.

It could be, of course, that my stories were crap. No one wanted them because they thought they were rubbish. Which does suggest that only good stories get published – but you’d have to be a real idiot to believe that. There is a lot of crap that gets published. Some of it even becomes popular.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. For every Leviathan Wakes, there’s an Embassytown (for every A Game of Thrones, a The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms). Not that any of those four novels are relevant. Science fiction (and fantasy) is a broad church, and the most popular sect will always be the least sophisticated. Most sf readers – most sf fans, in fact – don’t contribute to the genre conversation. They just consume. And it’s their levels of consumption that dictate in which direction the genre travels, not the commentary by those actively engaged with science fiction.

Take, for example, the Arthur C Clarke Award. Yesterday at noon, I started a thread on this year’s shortlist on SFF Chronicles. As of 8 am this morning, there were no comments on it. No one’s interested. They want to discuss the latest installment of A Song of Ice and Fire, or some fifty-year-old piece of crap that’s set firmly within their comfort zone and does little more than reinforce their prejudices

How can science fiction combat that willful blindness? No matter how relevant the genre is, if it’s preaching to an empty room it can never succeed.