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Waking the Dead

The eighth series of Waking the Dead finished a couple of weeks ago. And it’s difficult to know what to make of it. One character died, one resigned but then seemed to stay, one transferred out of the team, and one handed over to a replacement while she went into hospital… but her replacement cocked things up and so might not be taking over after all.

Waking the Dead, for those of you who have never heard of it, or don’t watch it, is a BBC drama about a police team which investigates old unsolved case, the Metropolitan Police’s Cold Case Unit. The programme has been broadcast annually since 2001, and each series usually takes the form of four to six two-hour episodes, each one split over two nights (typically Sunday and Monday). At present, the Cold Case Unit comprises Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve), psychological profiler Dr Grace Foley (Sue Johnston), Detective Inspector Spencer Jordan (Will Johnson), Detective Sergeant Stella Goodman (Félicité du Jeu), and forensic pathologist Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara FitzGerald).

I don’t normally write about television programmes on this blog – well, not unless they’re science fiction… But Waking the Dead is one of my favourite series. And that’s despite not being much of a fan of police procedurals. Waking the Dead, however, is not only classy drama, with high production values, it’s also very watchable. And – it is probably this which appeals to me the most – each series it does something interesting… as a police procedural and as a television drama. Past series, for example, have been themed, with each story an interpretation of the theme. It has run story-arcs in the background over multiple series. And in series eight, it put the entire cast at risk, and then failed to resolve their fates.

In fact, if there is a theme to series eight, it’s that: lack of resolution. Not one of the four stories was properly resolved. I couldn’t actually decide if this was deliberate, a choice explored by the writers, or simply evidence of poor writing. Given the programme’s history, I’m inclined to the former.

But it’s such an odd choice of theme. And its implementation seemed to undercut the plausibility of the programme.

In the first two-parter, ‘Magdalene 26’, a body found hanging in the victim’s house, which has been dead for several days, proves crucial to the investigation. Except… it is never actually identified. Initially, it’s believed to be the victim’s husband, but he later turns up alive. So who was it?

So: not resolved. One or two loose ends I can accept. Not everything needs to be tied up neatly.

But the ending of the story? The murder eventually proves to be the work of a pair of Turkish gangsters, after the victim’s millions. Boyd, claiming to be a shady financier, arranges to meet the Turks in a secluded spot. He has a pair of hidden snipers with him. Boyd pulls out his warrant card to show the Turks. One goes for his gun. Two shots ring out. The credits roll.

Hang on a minute.

They haven’t solved the case. Justice hasn’t been served. The Cold Case Unit shot the villains. That doesn’t happen in the UK.Certainly not without a great deal more provocation.

Was this, perhaps, an attempt to make the series more US-friendly? Or was it a commentary on US-style police procedurals?

The second two-parter, ‘End of the Night’, made it no clearer. Twelve years earlier, a teenage girl was raped and her younger brother murdered by a pair of men the authorities have failed to identify. The girl, now a young woman, attempts suicide, and this inspires Boyd to re-open the investigation. Eventually, the Cold Case Unit identify both rapists. The young woman learns their names. She kidnaps the man who murdered her brother and takes him to the scene of the crime, a high stone bridge over a narrow brook. She murders the killer, and then tries to kill herself by jumping off the bridge. Boyd stops her before she can. The credits roll.

Okay. A more plausible ending, certainly. But the only resolution is that of the victim’s character arc. And, like ‘Magdalene 26′, it’s a more abrupt ending than you’d expect from a television drama.

Like the previous two, the third story, Substitute’, started well enough. Eve enters into a relationship with a man, but doubts his identity. So she secretly takes a DNA swab, and checks up on him. It seems his DNA was found at the scene of a ten-year-old murder – in fact, his semen was on the victim’s body. The means by which Eve took the DNA means the evidence is tainted. But Boyd insists on re-opening the investigation into the murder. As the story progresses, the more it seems the main suspect, Eve’s lover, is not guilty. Or is he? Not that it really matters. During the investigation, the team have identified the villain of the piece. At the end of the episode, Eve has taken her lover to a remote boat-house in order to determine whether he is truly innocence. The rest of the team turn up. As does the villain and his henchman. Eve gets her answer. Boyd and the team drive away, leaving the suspect to be killed by the villain. A shot rings out. The credits roll.

Er.. what? The Cold Case Unit left their suspect to be murdered by a criminal? What happened to justice? The Cold Case Unit are members of the Metropolitan Police, aren’t they? They’ve not only allowed a murder to take place, and so condoned it, but they’ve also failed to charge the villain – against whom they have plenty of evidence.

I did wonder if this was the last series of Waking the Dead, and they were wrapping everything up. Stella had been shot in the first two-parter – and then abruptly died off-stage in hospital from a thrombosis. Spencer had jumped ship to CID, and Eve had handed in her resignation. Boyd was complicit in a murder, and clearly going off the deep end.

The Cold Case Unit was finished.

But no. The final two-parter, ‘Endgame’, seemed to be a return to form. It brought back an old villain, the psychopathic prison guard Linda Cummings from series seven, and also referenced a couple of episodes from previous series. Spencer, despite his move, was dragged back in to help. Stella’s replacement Kat was clearly now a full member of the team. Grace, however, had been admitted into hospital for treatment for cancer, and a replacement had joined the unit. Played by Gina McKee. Casting her led me to suspect she would be staying, that Grace was going to be written out. But she proved to be partly complicit in Linda Cummings’ scheme. So she’s unlikely to stay. And we still don’t know what’s going to happen to Grace.

The ending of the story was also less abrupt than those of the preceding two-parters. Cummings kidnaps Grace from her hospital bed, and threatens to kill her unless Boyd does as she says. There’s a last-minute reprieve and Grace is rescued unharmed. It is, on reflection, an almost traditional ending to these sort of stories. It is also completely at odds with the endings of other series eight stories. It’s as if the writers bent the concept of a “police procedural story ending” completely out of shape… only to let it snap back in the final two-parter. Which certainly qualifies as “interesting”.

Perhaps they had no choice – they had to leave the series as they found it. This is not unusual, given that most television programmes are made on a series by series, or season by season, basis. Some, such as Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes (also programmes I like a great deal), have strictly-defined runs – although I believe this is a lot more common on British television than it is on US television. But still most expect to return the following year. And so they have to leave cast and story-arc in a state which does not preclude continuation.

But this doesn’t explain the events of the first three two-parters of series eight. Certainly one of the cast has gone – killed in the line of duty. Spencer is unlikely to return given his transfer. Eve resigned, but then stayed on. But perhaps she’s leaving too. Grace’s fate is unknown.

And yet, if no series nine was planned, I would have expected a more final ending to ‘Endgame’ – I suspect the title is not a hint. The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to believe that in this series the writers were exploring the use of dramatic unconventional endings. While this may have had unintended consequences – plausibility took something of a bashing, and the various endings seemed more characterised by a lack of resolution than anything else – it does strike me as a valid, and interesting, artistic choice.

I can only wonder what next year’s theme will be. Because I certainly hope there will be a series nine.


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Anatomy of a Story: Thicker Than Water

The second of the two stories I’ve put up on this blog is ‘Thicker Than Water’, a hard sf story set on a moon of Saturn. It was originally published in Jupiter sf magazine, issue 23, in January 2009.

Major Gina Priest lives on Tethys, a moon of Saturn. When two raiders from another moon, Titan, attempt to steal some of the fullerenes found on Tethys, they are captured. Gina is shocked to discover that one of the raiders is her brother. She learns she was abducted from Titan at a very young age. After another officer disobeys her orders and tortures the raiders, Gina decides to help the Titans escape and return with them to to her long-lost mother and father.

Here’s the PDF. You might want to read the story before you continue reading this.

The plot of ‘Thicker Than Water’ is based on the story of Iphigenia from ancient Greece. She was abducted as a child and taken to Tauris, where she grew up and became a priestess of Artemis. A pair of Athenians then raided the temple while Iphigenia was present. She learned they were her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. So she lied to the Taurians, and returned to Athens to join her long-lost family. With the statue of Artemis they had stolen.

I forget where I originally came across Iphigenia’s story. It was back in the early 1990s, so it wasn’t on the Web. I’d also found a mention of a mysterious dark patch on Tethys in a planetology textbook I’d bought for reference – Exploring the Planets by Eric H Christiansen and Kenneth W Hamblin (1995). The book’s a bit out-of-date now, but I have the Web instead. I decided that the dark patch was buckminsterfullerenes – carbon molecules in the shape of spheres or tubes, which were thought to be artificial but do occur very rarely in nature. This idea came partly from another story, ‘Black Rain’ (available in Set It In Space And Stick A Robot In It), which is set on Titan, and takes place in an earlier version of the universe of ‘Thicker Than Water’. In that story, the settlement’s manufactory was destroyed by a blow-in of Titan’s noxious atmosphere, and the superconductor cultures were poisoned. So, instead of Aphrodite’s statue, I’d have Orestes and Pylades, natives of Titan, travelling to Tethys to steal fullerenes in order to re-seed their superconductor cultures. It all slotted very neatly together – and this is actually mentioned in passing in ‘Thicker Than Water’.

I wrote the story, and even submitted it to a magazine or two. They rejected it.

Then it sat in the “bottom drawer” for over a decade.

Last year, I dug out the manuscript, read through it, and decided it was worth having another go. But it needed more than just rewriting. While reminding myself of Iphigenia’s story, I came across mention of Euripides, an ancient Greek playwright. He actually wrote a play, Iphigenia in Tauris, based on Iphigenia’s story. So there’s another dimension, I thought. I can tie in an ancient Greek tragedy.

Greek plays, of course, have Greek choruses. So why shouldn’t ‘Thicker Than Water’ have one? And since NASA had posted a MP3 of the radio noises generated by Saturn, why not use the ringed gas giant as my “chorus”? Hence the numerous mentions of Saturn’s radio-noise in the story.

I used the play in other ways, too. I borrowed the odd phrase from the Potter translation (which provides the lines from the play which preface the story). And I named all my characters for the characters in the play. The king of Tauris is Thoas, but I decided to use King instead. Iphigenia, priestess of Aphrodite, is of course Gina Priest. Orestes and Pylades I shortened to Orris and Pyle. And two unnamed characters, a herald and a herdsman, became Messenger and Shepard.

There are a few other scattered “clues” as well – such as “as if from some oracular distance” in the opening paragraph. Oracular. Oracle. Delphi. Get it?

Oh, and Tauris… In the original version of the story, the settlement on Tethys was also a carousel – a ring which rotated at a speed sufficient to provide some gravity – but it was unnamed. When I stumbled across Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, it occurred to me that a carousel could be torus-shaped. So Tauris became Torus. Sometimes research just gifts you things you’d be a fool to refuse or ignore.

I also changed the plot slightly when I rewrote the story. In the original version, Gina decides to help her brother to escape, but when she returns to his cell he has already been taken away. The story ended with her being unable to prevent his execution – as he was pushed out of an airlock without a spacesuit. For the new version, I had the three of them escape successfully. Which then allowed me to bring the alien sentinel more into the story. That – the mysterious alien vessel patrolling the Solar system – was there right from the start, but more as a clue to why Earth had abandoned its space colonies, and as the reason for the Tethysians protection of the sea of fullerenes.

It had always been in the back of my mind to have ‘Thicker Than Water’ (and the earlier ‘Black Rain’) be part of a single fictional universe. In it, Earth has withdrawn all its space resources, shut down its EM broadcasting, and essentially firewalled itself inside its atmosphere. This has left on their own the many settlements and colonies scattered on Mars and the moons of the Saturn, Jupiter and the Outer Planets. These settlements have also discovered a series of strange alien artefacts, most of which resemble extremely unlikely natural phenomena. Their purpose is unknown. And then there’s the mysterious alien sentinel loose in the Solar system which doesn’t take kindly to any kind of interference with these artefacts.

Now that I was basing my stories on the plays of Euripides, I decided to call this my Euripidean Space universe.

Despite all this going on in the background, the story still needed something more. The escape succeeded, and in the process doomed the Tethys settlement – from an implied attack by the alien… That gave me a better ending. But I needed something extra to round out the middle. So I looked to the news. And came up with…

Torture. The Tethysians would torture the two raiders from Titan, and that would in part explain Gina’s motivation to help Orris and Pyle escape.

I’m not actually all that interested in writing science fiction, I’m more interested in using science fiction in writing, in extending the genre. I don’t want to write adventure stories in a science-fictional universe – I consider it a form of artistic cowardice. ‘Thicker Than Water’ is in part a sf treatment of an ancient Greek play – it uses the same cast, and I tried in some way to carry the flavour across. But it’s also about torture, about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Stories should be about something, about something relevant. Even if they are set in outer space and feature spaceships and aliens. Perhaps even especially if they are set in outer space and feature spaceships and aliens.

I read through the story now, nine months after it was published, and perhaps one or two of the reviews of it weren’t so far off the mark. Perhaps some of the characters’ motivations weren’t entirely clear – one of the perils, I suspect, of taking a story from an ancient Greek play. Perhaps the ending did seem a little disconnected… but the clues were there. But maybe that’s because that aspect of the story wasn’t intended to entirely stand alone – it would be just one element in a greater story, told through many stories. On reflection, I shouldn’t have relied on that. I’ll know better for the next one. And yes, there are more Euripidean Space stories planned.

Again, I hope you enjoyed both the story and this piece on it. No other stories of mine have been published in the last twelve months, although there’s a few due to see the light of day soon. Some time in the future, I may give one of those the same treatment.


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Readings, yes, and watchings too

In lieu of intelligent content, here’s another trawl through the books what I’ve read and the films what I’ve watched since the last time I did one of these posts…

Books
Lord Valentine’s Castle, Robert Silverberg (1980), was September’s book for this year’s reading challenge. I wrote about it here.

Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming (1954), I found in a local charity shop and I’m glad I got it cheap. The films are much better than the books. The books may be very much products of their time, but the casual racism and sexism makes them hard to enjoy. The plot, incidentally, only vaguely resembles that of the movie.

Fantasms and Magics, Jack Vance (1969), is a collection of short stories. The opening novella, ‘The Miracle Workers’, is classic Vance, and ‘Guyal of Sfere’ (which I kept on misreading as ‘Gruyere’) is a Dying Earth novella and quite good. The rest are forgettable.

The Dan Dare Dossier, Frank Hampson et al (1990), is the last of the thirteen volume series of Dan Dare reprints issued by Hawk Publishing. Unlike the others it’s not a reprint of strips from Eagle, but a discussion of Hampson, his studio of artists, the characters, world, and merchandising associated with the strip. The text could have done with some serious editing, but if you’re a fan of Dan Dare – as I am – then it’s all interesting and useful information.

Broken Symmetries, Steve Redwood (2009), is a collection of short stories by a small-press writer which I reviewed for Interzone.

Winged Rocketry, James C Sparks (1968), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

Shades of Gray, Lewis Shiner (2008), is a chapbook given away with purchases of the limited edition of Shiner’s last novel, Black & White. Shiner himself describes the four stories in Shades of Gray as either too rough, too slight, or too silly to go into the upcoming Collected Stories. It’s hard not to disagree.

Shifts, Adam Thorpe (2000), is themed collection of short stories, the theme being careers and people whose lives are defined by their careers. The stand-out is the title story, about a Ghanaian immigrant eking out a living in London in 1966. ‘Sawmill’ is a Greenesque tale set in, I think, an invented African nation, and is also very good. Some of the others don’t seem to do much, but the writing throughout is of a very high standard. I plan to read more Thorpe.

The Lordly Ones, Keith Roberts (1986), is also a collection of short stories. I like Roberts’ fiction – in fact, one of his short stories is a favourite, ‘The Lake of Tuonela’. Sadly, there’s nothing as good as that in this; nor indeed is The Lordly Ones as good a collection as the collection in which that appears, The Grain Kings. On the whole, some lovely writing in places, but a little dated in execution.

Transition, Iain Banks (2009). A new novel by Banks deserves a review all its own. And it shall get one. Soon. Keep watching.

Films
Highlander, dir. Russell Mulcahy (1986), I first saw when it came out twenty-three years ago. I remember at the time thinking it reminded me of an sf novel – one I later identified as George Turner’s Vaneglory. Watching it again, it’s not so close to the novel, but it is, well, very camp. All that posing in dark alleys and lights shining through rain and steam. And the Queen soundtrack. I also seem to recall the film being held in relatively high regard, although I can’t see why. There’s the bizarre casting: a Frenchman as a Scot, and a Scot as a Spaniard (well, Egyptian originally). The badly-choreographed fight scenes. The stereotype characters. And the franchise degraded in quality, too.

The Spirit, dir. Frank Miller (2008), I’d heard plenty of bad words about, but I decided to see for myself. It is bad. The look of the film aping a comic – like Sin City and 300 – is just a gimmick. The story is silly, the characters are paper-thin, the women are there to make the men look good, and the dialogue is cringe-worthy. Not impressed.

The Faculty, dir. Robert Rodriguez (1998), has to be one of the most blatant metaphors ever committed to celluloid. Oh noes, the teachers have all been taken over by aliens! But it’s done with tongue firmly in cheek, and even Josh Hartnett’s brainiac slacker character doesn’t spoil the fun. Plus there’s a few mentions of sf and sf authors by someone who clearly knew what they were talking about. A fun film.

Total Reality, dir. Philip J Roth (1997), is a bad straight-to-DVD sf film. That should be enough to make me avoid it, but in fact the opposite happens. I want to watch these sort of films, no matter how crap they are. And I never really enjoy them. Because they’re so bad. But I keep on watching them. In this one, a team of soldiers sentenced to death for treason are sent back in time on the trail of a pair of rebels. They have to prevent the murder of the self-help guru whose “system” was adopted by a politician and subsequently resulted in a brutal interstellar empire several centuries later. The CGI is terrible, the production design is awful, and the acting is poor. But the explosion of the guru’s house is pretty impressive.

Futuresport, dir. Ernest R Dickerson (1998), is another bad straight-to-DVD sf film. But with a surprisingly high-powered cast: Wesley Snipes, Vanessa Williams and Dean Cain. How the mighty have fallen. Well, not Dean Cain – he was never A-list. Futuresport is little more than a remake of Rollerball, but nowhere near as good as that film. All you really need to know is that it’s about a new ball game, called Futuresport. If you were going to invent a new ball game, why would you call it “futuresport”? It’s a dumb name.

Letter From An Unknown Woman, dir. Max Ophüls (1948), is another film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 films list. I have three lists on Lovefilm DVD rentals – one for recent films, one for foreign films, and one for films from the Time Out list. Each month, I’m sent two from each list. Not all the films from the Time Out list have struck me as enjoyable or impressive. Letter From An Unknown Woman was one such. Louis Jourdan plays a self-centred concert pianist who sleeps with, and then discards, a young woman – played by Joan Fontaine – who has had a crush on him since she was a girl. The story is framed as a letter written by the woman, and sent to Jourdan after she’s died. I found it a bit dull.

Soldier, dir. Paul WS Anderson (1998). Yes, I know: Anderson has never made a good film. (Although his television movie, The Sight, is actually not bad.) Soldier is certainly worse than Event Horizon (see here). It’s Rambo in all but setting. Which is a planet on which some vaguely-defined interstellar human federation dumps its rubbish (shades of Futurama). Kurt Russell plays a genetically-engineered soldier who is left for dead and dumped on the planet of rubbish after losing in a demonstration fight against a newer model. Where he is taken in by a lost colony. And those exact same newer models just happen to visit the planet of rubbish on manoeuvres. They attack the colonists. Russell fights back. It’s another Anderson film which makes very little sense if you think about it too hard. The story follows through from beginning to middle to end, but there’s no logic to it, or to the world on which it takes place.

Léon, dir. Luc Besson (1994), I reviewed for videovista.net – see here.

Earth Alien, dir. Kevin Tenney (2002), is yet another crap sf film. It doesn’t boast the talent of Futuresport, but it’s not that far off – Eric Roberts, Arnold Vosloo and the ubiquitous John Rhys Davies. Someone is killing people in gyms, and Roberts is the detective investigating. Turns out the serial killer is an alien on hunting trip. Earth is a game reserve, humans are the prey, and Vosloo is the game warden. A very silly film. There’s not even a good explosion in it.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, dir. Jack Perez (2009), I reviewed for videovista.net – see here.

Daratt, dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (2006), I rented after enjoying Haroun’s earlier Abouna. Like that film, it’s set in Haroun’s native Chad. Sixteen-year-old Atim, orphaned by the civil war, determines to find the man who killed his father – as all war criminals have been given amnesty by the government now that the civil war has finally ended. He heads for, I think, the capital N’Djamena, where he discovers that his father’s killer, Nassara, is now a baker, attends mosque regularly, and has a young pregnant wife. In order to get close to the man and so find an opportunity for revenge, Atim apprentices himself to Nassara. And as he gets to know him, the less he wants to kill him. An excellent film. Recommended.

Privates On Parade, dir. Michael Blakemore (1982), is based on a play by Peter Nicholls, which is in turn based on his own experiences, as described in his autobiography, Feeling You’re Behind, which I read several years ago. The film is about a British armed forces concert party in Malaysia in 1948. Many of the characters are apparently based on real-life individuals. It’s a comedy, but it’s hard to know exactly who or what are its targets. John Cleese plays the commanding officer, and he’s a typical John Cleese character. The rest of the cast are just as much caricatures. And the English countryside makes a poor stand-in for the Malayan jungle. Mildly amusing.

Burn After Reading, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen (2008). I’m not a big fan of the Coen brothers’ films. I’ll watch them, and I sort of enjoy them. But that’s about all. This one is fairly typical of their oeuvre. John Malkovich plays a nasty intelligence analyst fired by the CIA, who subsequently starts writing his memoirs. Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt plays a pair of dim-witted gym employees who find a CD-ROM containing Malkovich’s memoir. George Clooney plays an equally dim-witted philanderer who gets involved with Malkovich’s wife and McDormand, and so gets dragged into the whole sorry mess. More amusing than Privates On Parade, but not by a great deal.

The Stepford Wives, dir. Bryan Forbes (1975), is the original adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name. Which makes it the superior adaptation. It’s certainly an unsettling film, but not a very scary one. The plot staggers around a little and the sub-Hitchcockian ending is a bit of a let down, but it hangs together entertainingly.

All That Heaven Allows, dir. Douglas Sirk (1955), is from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 films list and… it couldn’t have been more different than Letter From An Unknown Woman. I don’t recall ever watching a film by Sirk before, and I didn’t expect much of this. A 1950s melodrama, starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. But. I loved it. So much so that I immediately went and bought the Directed By Douglas Sirk boxed set from Amazon – well, it was reduced from £69.99 to £13.48. Bargain. So All That Heaven Allows is just Lady Chatterley’s Lover set in 1950s USA, but it’s beautifully done and the 1950s Technicolour looks wonderful. You expect some wit in films of that period, but the condemnation of contemporary society and mores is done with surprising subtlety. A new film for the favourites list. Recommended.

Loulou, dir. Maurice Pialat (1980), stars a very young-looking Isabelle Huppert, and Gérard Depardieu, who seems to have looked the same for the past three decades. Huppert leaves her husband and shacks up with aimless drifter Depardieu. Things happen. It’s all very 1970s, very French and very sexist. Enjoyable, but I felt no desire to dash out and buy the DVD.


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Book Porn – Shepard & Shiner

Lucius Shepard and Lewis Shiner are among the finest writers of fantasy (and the occasional science fiction) currently being published. Shepard has won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, two World Fantasy Awards, a Sturgeon Award, a Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), a Kurd Laßwitz Award (Germany), five International Horror Guild Awards, a Rhysling (poetry), and a Shirley Jackson Award. He also won the Campbell New Writer Award for 1985. Shiner has not been so lauded and to date has only won a single World Fantasy Award. But then, many of his novels have been presented as mainstream rather than fantasy.

Both are writers whose novels and stories I admire as much as I enjoy. So I collect them. First editions, of course. Many are also signed – but both are frequently published by small presses, such as PS Publishing and Subterranean Press, which produce beautifully put-together signed limited editions.

But on with the photos. Below are the books I own by both writers. My Shepard collection is far from complete, but the Shiner one is… although there is a Collected Stories due to be published later this year by Subterranean.


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Catastrophia ToC announced

Editor Allen Ashley has announced the full table of contents of his forthcoming anthology, Catastrophia. The stories, by alphabetical order of author are:

  • ‘Hapless Humanity’ by Brian Aldiss
  • ‘The Phoney War’ by Nina Allan
  • ‘Nanoamerica’ by David John Baker
  • ‘Steven’s Boat’ by Billie Bundschuh
  • ‘Happy Ending’ by Simon Clark
  • ‘Something for Nothing’ by Joe Essid
  • ‘Check’ by Robert Guffey
  • ‘Fade’ by David Gullen
  • ‘Trouble with Telebrations’ by “J. B. Harris”
  • ‘Up’ by Andrew Hook
  • ‘A Hard Place’ by Carole Johnstone
  • ‘Scalped’ by Jet McDonald
  • ‘Noose’ by Adam Roberts
  • ‘In the Face of Disaster’ by Ian Sales
  • ‘Pixels on a Screen’ by Patrick Shuler
  • ‘The Long Road to the Sea’ by James L. Sutter
  • ‘Gravity Wave’ by Douglas Thompson
  • ‘Crashes’ by Stuart Young

I’m in good company there, I see.

See here for the full press release.


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Anatomy of a Story: The Amber Room

It occurred to me some people might find it interesting to learn how I came up with the ideas for my stories, how I approached those ideas, and what I was trying to achieve with the stories which resulted.

First up is ‘The Amber Room’, which was published in Pantechnicon #9 in March 2009. If I were to write a blurb for the story, it would go something like this:

Tina lives in a museum, but this museum contains all the lost art treasures of the world. They were found by her boyfriend Chris, who has an amazing ability: he can visit alternate universes. That’s where he “found” the lost art treasures.

Here’s a PDF of the ‘The Amber Room’; so you can read it before reading the rest of this post.

The idea for the story came to me sometime in March 2007. As far as I recall, it was inspired by the real-life Amber Room itself, mention of which I’d stumbled across somewhere on the Web. I wanted to use it in a story, but, of course, it was lost. So why not write a story about it being found? And since I write science fiction, why not have it found in an alternate universe? In fact, why not have an entire museum filled with “lost” works of art which had been found in alternate universes?

But that’s not actually a story. It needs a plot, characters… a beginning, middle and end…

I remember banging out a first draft in pretty much a single sitting. In that original version, the story focused on Chris, the universe-hopping “art thief”, and was structured as a series of vignettes from his life in no particular chronological order. But it had the same sting in the tail: the identity of Chris’ girlfriend, that she was him from an alternate universe in which his “parents” had had a daughter.

I emailed the draft to a group of friends to see what they thought to it. We’ve been emailing each other stories and novel excerpts for several years now; I value their comments. They liked the central premise, but not the way I’d chosen to tell the story. I rewrote it, making Tina the central character and giving the narrative a linear structure. I sent this second draft to my friends. They liked it a great deal better. However, they still weren’t keen on the ending – initially, the story explained that Tina and Chris were alternate versions of each other. I changed that, made it, well, subtle – i.e., having Tina look at a pair of photographs which reveal the truth… And that too nicely linked in with the Amber Room and the whole concept of “lost” art, turning it into a metaphor of the central relationship. Sometimes, you get to a point in a story where all the choices you made earlier, without really knowing why you made them, suddenly slot together and it all works.

After that, it was simply a matter of refining and polishing the prose. At one point, it occurred to me that since the Amber Room featured four mosaics depicting the five senses, then I should do the same in the story. So every section is written such that it references each of the five senses, beginning with Tina hearing something, then seeing, then touching, and so on.

For example, from the first section: we have “The slam of the door echoed in memory, but she heard now only the metronome click of her heels on the marble steps” (sound). Later in the same section is, “The windows to her right painted great rectangles of sunlight on the floor” (sight). Then “Whenever in the Room, she felt a desire to run her fingers over the mosaics’ tessellae…” (touch), and “The Room soothed her, calmed her. It smelled of history” (er, smell). And finally, “… the wine tasted unnaturally full-bodied and rich to her” (taste). It’s not always a smooth progression – and looking back at the story now, I can see a couple of places where I slipped up and used a sight reference in a line that should have been sound reference, and so on.

Choosing to use the senses in this way also proved useful as it provided a framework for the descriptive writing. Because I could only use imagery specific to the sense referenced at that point in the narrative, I had to think harder about my sentences and word-choices. Take the line “She glanced back up the cochlea-curve of the staircase”. Originally, I’d used “nautilus-curve”, which was the image I wanted; but “cochlea” is hearing-related, and of a similar shape, so I used that instead. And I think it works better too.

Then there was the research. Every single piece of art mentioned in the story is real, and very much lost. When you’re writing, research should hurt. You need to get everything right. Sf is not like it used to be – you can’t just blithely invent stuff, or wave an authorial hand in front of the reader. Like you, readers have got access to the Internet, and they can fact-check as well as you can. Science fiction doesn’t mean you can make it up as you go along. On the contrary, it’s harder to write because you can’t rely on readers’ assumptions or common knowledge.

And, I should point out, it was while researching more about the Amber Room that I learnt of the four mosaics it contained. Which I then fed back into the story as a framework for the prose in each section. So none of it was wasted.

As for the roll call of alternate history sf mentioned on page four… The novels and stories mentioned are all ones I’ve read, and some of them I admire a great deal. Sticking ‘The Amber Room’ in among them was just my attempt at a little postmodern humour. And the “two films – different futures dependent upon whether or not a train was caught” on page seven… Most people have realised that one is Sliding Doors; the other is Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

‘The Amber Room’ was a deliberate attempt to write a “literary” sf story. I wasn’t interested in exploring the central premise. I was interested in the premise’s effect on two people and their relationship. How their relationship came about, how it was progressing. And I wanted the story to be about politics too, about the complicity and greed of politicians. Yes, I could have written a story in which Chris uses his experiences of all those alternate universes to create the perfect political system, or to help humanity reach the stars, or something equally sfnal… But that would be a different story and, to tell the truth, I’m not that interested in writing sf which privileges the central idea. I see the premise, the sfnal aspect of the story, as an enabling device – it enables a story that could not take place without it, that could not be transposed into another genre. If you can swap out the furniture and change the labels, and the story remains unchanged, then it’s not science fiction.

‘The Amber Room’ is by no means perfect – there are rough spots in it. But I achieved what I set out to do with it, and I stand by it. I was disappointed it received so many rejections – five, according to my records – before Pantechnicon took it. I thought it was better than that; I still do. I’d like to think others do as well. And I’d like to think others have found this dissection of it informative and useful.

I hope to do the same soon for the other story of mine I’ve posted here: ‘Thicker Than Water’.


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Thicker Than Water

My story ‘Thicker Than Water’ was published in Jupiter magazine’s January 2009 issue. Unlike ‘The Amber Room’ (see here), it received a couple of reviews and was described as an “exciting story” (SFRevu) and “a good story with much promise, atmospheric and exciting” (SF Crowsnest). SF Site was less complimentary – “I was not really convinced … either by the motivations of anyone involved, nor by the potentially interesting conclusion, which is not sufficiently a part of the rest of the story.” For the record, ‘Thicker Than Water’ was inspired by the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. Click the link below to download the story in PDF format.

Thicker Than Water


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Reading Challenge #9 – Lord Valentine’s Castle, Robert Silverberg

I can’t say I’m a huge Silverberg fan. I’ve read many of his books and short stories, and I’ve enjoyed them. But I’ve never made an effort to seek out those of his works I’ve not read – as I have done with some other writers. To be fair, Silverberg is one of the stalwarts of the genre. He’s had – and still has, of course – a fifty-four year writing career, and has mostly produced good books and stories. During that more-than-half-a-century, he has won four Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards.

Silverberg’s most well-known creation is, arguably, the world of Majipoor, on which he has set seven novels, two novellas and a short story. The first of these is Lord Valentine’s Castle, published in 1980.

Majipoor is a big planet – in fact, it was inspired by Jack Vance’s novel, Big Planet – with four enormous continents. The world has been settled for thousands of years and has a population of some sixty billion; but it is now something of a backwater, and rarely visited by people from other planets. It is home to several races – humans, Skandars, Ghayrogs, Vroons, Su-Suheris, Liimen, and Hjorts. There are also the native Metamorphs, from whom the humans took the world, and they now live in a reservation. Majipoor is ruled by four potentates – the Coronal, who is the executive arm of government and rules from his castle atop the thirty-mile-high Castle Mount; the Pontifex, the legislative arm, who lives in the Labyrinth; the Lady of the Isle of Sleep, who through dreams provides the world’s moral framework; and the King of Dreams, who punishes wrongdoers, also through dreams.

Lord Valentine’s Castle opens with a man called Valentine on a ridge looking down upon the city of Pidruid, on the western shore of the continent Zimroel. He doesn’t know who he is, or how he got there. A passing boy, taking cattle to market in Pidruid, approaches him and the two enter the city together. Within a couple of chapters, Valentine has shown an uncanny natural ability at juggling, and joined a juggling troupe. The Coronal – also called Valentine – is due to appear shortly in Pidruid on the Grand Processional all coronals take shortly after ascending to power.

The name is not a coincidence. Valentine the juggler soon learns that he was Coronal Valentine but, by some art or science never explained, his mind has been swapped into another body and someone else has taken his place as coronal. The more of his memory Valentine recovers, the more he determines to take back his throne. So he travels across Zimroel to its east coast, and there takes ship to the Isle of Sleep, in order to persuade the Lady (who is always the mother of the coronal) of his true identity. And after succeeding in doing that, he continues on to the eastern continent, Alhanroel, to first gain the Pontifex’s support, and then march on Castle Mount and throw down the usurper.

And that’s pretty much the plot. Silverberg intended that “the book must be fun” – “all light, delightful, raffish…” And in that respect he succeeds. Valentine encounters obstacles on his way, but he overcomes them. He has exciting adventures – some of which seem a little too much, such as being swallowed by a legendarily giant sea-dragon while en route to the Isle of Sleep.

But then, Lord Valentine’s Castle is not a book to take seriously. It has a simple plot and a hero who prevails. It is, above all, colourful – Valentine’s journey east is very descriptive. And everything he sees and meets is exotic. And we know it is exotic because Silverberg has given it a made-up name. Although not all names, it has to be said, actually work all that well. “Niyk-tree” isn’t too bad, nor is “blave”; but “stajja” and “dhiim” just look like typographical accidents.

What strikes me most about this book is not the acknowledged debt it owes to Big Planet, but the debt it owes to Vance. Silverberg is channelling Vance. He does it well, because Silverberg is nothing if not a master craftsman. But, all the same, Lord Valentine’s Castle often feels a little like there’s too much Vance in it, as if Silverberg has crammed several novels by Vance into one book – which at 506 pages (in my 1982 Pan paperback; not the cover shown above) probably is equivalent to several novels by Vance…

Unlike some of the other books I’ve read in this year’s reading challenge, I didn’t regret rereading Lord Valentine’s Castle. I quite enjoyed it. It’s mind candy, but the sort of mind candy a friend might bring back from a trip to a foreign country – still fluffy, but with an exotic flavour to it. It’s a good book to read on a dull journey. And, like many books of its type, its general shape will linger – that the world of Majipoor is so big, Castle Mount and the Fifty Cities on its slopes, the overall story of the book but not Valentine’s individual adventures… and that it all ends happily. It had been a good twenty years or more since I last read Lord Valentine’s Castle, and still it felt comfortably familiar. Which is no bad thing sometimes.