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Category Archives: science fiction


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Support your local sf award

An open letter from Tom Hunter, director of the Arthur C Clarke Award, has been posted on the Torque Control blog here. In the letter, Tom writes, “the Award is now faced with an immediate and pressing need to change, adapt and re-evaluate its role and function as it moves into 2012 and its next quarter century”, and has asked for people’s thoughts on the Award and how it should change.

The questions Tom asks are:

What value does the Award bring to the SF community and what role should it play in its future?
A great deal of value, especially to UK sf. I’m not sure it needs to expand its current role, however.

How important is a UK focused prize in an increasingly international and digital marketplace?
Increasingly important – there is a vibrant sf community in the UK, and it would be a shame to see the genre homogenised as the larger US market comes to dominate both print and digital sectors.

What more could the Award do as part of its broader advocacy remit to promote science fiction?
Persuade publishers to add “shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award”, or “winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award” onto the covers of relevant books – even if they are not marketted as science fiction. Persuade publishers to pay for in-store Clarke Award promotions for relevant novels after the shortlist has been announced (some publishers, I believe, already do this). Add more dynamic content to the Clarke Award website – i.e., a bigger online presence: a forum, critical articles, etc.

How much does the success and the credibility of the Award depend on it having a cash prize?
A cash prize means it is more likely to be taken seriously.

What new partnerships and opportunities could we create to generate seed funding for the future?
The UK Space Agency, perhaps? University science and literature departments? Genre small press publishers? Online and high street booksellers? National newspapers? Genre book bloggers? A cable television channel / production company? I’m not entirely sure what partnerships currently exist.

What do you think? What does the Arthur C. Clarke Award mean to you, how important a part of the SF landscape is it, and where would you like it to go from here?
I have a lot more respect for the Clarke Award than I do the Hugo. I may not have agreed with every book the Clarke juries over the years have shortlisted, or chose as winner, but they’ve consistently picked interesting novels – or novels which generate interesting discussions. The Clarke has done more to foster debate within the UK sf community than I suspect the Hugo has done in US fandom. I especially like the fact that the juries look outside the sf marketing category, and as a result have identified novels which have been enthusiastically adopted by sf readers. That policy, I think, should certainly continue.

Each year, I have made an effort – not always successfully, I must admit – to read the novels shortlisted by the Clarke Award. I do the same for the BSFA Award (for which I can vote), but the Clarke generally picks a more varied and interesting shortlist. I especially appreciate being able to look at the Clarke Award shortlist in any year and know that the books on it are among the best sf novels published in the UK that year.

That’s not something you can say of many other genre awards.


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The craft of space

I can’t decide if the success of USAF’s X-37B mission a couple of days ago is the most exciting thing to have happened recently regarding space, or simply further evidence that the US’s space programme is moribund. The Boeing X-37B is an unmanned orbiter which, like the soon-to-be-retired Space Shuttle, is thrown into orbit atop a launch vehicle (an Atlas V) but lands like an aircraft on a runway. The X-37B landed at Vandenberg AFB on 3 December after 220 days in orbit – photos here and video of the landing here.

The X-37B could be exciting because it’s a new orbiter. Admittedly, it’s the Space Shuttle’s Mini-me, and it’s robotic. But it’s new tech, and it’s likely to be kept up to date. So it might well be the first in a whole new, and evolving, generation of spacecraft. Which is important since, after all, launch vehicles haven’t substantially changed in more than fifty years. Rocket engines still work the same way; the same fuels are still used. But a cutting-edge orbiter? That’s a different matter.

Of course, there are a number of crewed spacecraft already in use, or at various stages of development. Soyuz, which is, ahem, as old as I am. Shenzhou. Also a handful of uncrewed spacecraft, such as Progress, ATC, H-II. SpaceX’s Dragon has had one test flight, but it was a stripped-down version and it’ll be a while yet before it’s capable of lofting people into orbit. Then there’s all those currently on the drawing-boards of numerous companies: Excalibur Almaz, Skylon, Lynx, CST-100, Dream Chaser… And, of course, NASA’s own Orion spacecraft.

I’m still not convinced that COTS, the reliance on the commercial sector to open up space, is going to work. It needs long-term, capital-intensive investment to really exploit space, and private companies won’t, and often can’t, do that. They may help populate LEO, but anything further, and more interesting, is out of their budget and timeframe. Perhaps it’s time the ESA’s member-states upped their contributions and set about doing something exciting involving people.

Some of you are no doubt wondering why this post isn’t on my other blog, A Space About Books About Space, as that would seem better suited to the topic. But I wanted to drag the news about the X-37B into the ongoing series of whinges I’ve posted here about realism in space-based science fiction. If it feels like I’m going on and on and on about this, it’s because a) I find the nuts and bolts of it all fascinating, and b) I think there’s plenty of opportunity in it for science fiction to do something interesting.

Which is not to say that I completely repudiate space opera and all that fanciful magic tech you find in most space-based science fiction. Yes, yes, I know: they’re literary devices. But the problem with literary devices is that they quickly become set-dressing. And then before you know it, they’re being used all over the place without any real thought for how they ought to be deployed. And, you know, sf has been doing that sort of thing for eighty years, so perhaps it’s time to try something a little different. Not that realistic space-based sf – or, as I call it, “spacecore” – has never been done before. You have everything from Jeff Sutton’s First On The Moon to Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series of novels. And plenty in between. For me, however, the two touchstones are Jed Mercurio’s Ascent and the BBC television series Space Odyssey.

More by accident than by design, I’ve been quite faithful in my own short fiction. My Euripidean Space stories (see here) may feature a mysterious alien sentinel loose in the Solar system, but otherwise treat space and space travel realistically. And my story in Postscripts 20/21, ‘Killing the Dead’ (see here), was set aboard a generation starship – so no fancy bending of the laws of physics there. I did say a couple of months ago that I was going to try writing a genre heartland sf story, with FTL and aliens and all the space opera trappings. But I couldn’t do it. One turned into a slower-than-light story, and the other ended up as a UK-based anti-capitalist tale.

Of course, not every sf story idea is suitable for either space opera or spacecore. But at the very least focusing on the mechanics and physics of space travel should prevent writers from writing skiffy – ie, sf stories that don’t really need to be sf. You know the sort I mean: the space destroyer and her noble captain, re-fighting WWII in outer space. I think they call it “military sf”… Recognising that space is not just the blank stuff between plot points can only help concretize the sfnal elements of a story, can only lead to a story which will only work in the setting invented for it.

These days, no sf writer has an excuse for not making an effort – all the information you need is at your fingertips. Everything you could possibly want to know, about everything from the interstellar medium to star maps to the Pioneer Anomaly, can be found somewhere on the Internet. And all those spacecraft I mentioned earlier? There’s plenty of info on those to be found online too. You can get a very real idea of exactly what is required for travelling or living in space.

There are too many monsters in science fiction these days. It sort of takes the science out of it. Shine a spotlight on the hardware, on the physics required for all to work, and we might get back to the sort of sf that inspired generations of scientists and engineers. It’ll be optimistic too. It’s the nature of the material.

And, it goes without saying, there’s more than enough wonder for everyone.


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New moon

There’s a review here of issues 28 and 29 of Jupiter magazine on this month’s sfsite.com by Rich Horton. Jupiter XXVIII Autonoe has the second of my Euripidean Space stories in it (note to self: write more). Horton describes it as “a fun pure SF piece, a story of old wars and revenge in the moons of Saturn, with alien artefacts thrown in”. Not a bad response to a story I, er, “borrowed”  from an Ancient Greek tragedy…


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Calling occupants of interplanetary craft

I may have just destroyed my credibility by borrowing the title for this post from The Carpenters, but it does seem to fit the topic perfectly. To be fair, the song was written and originally recorded by Klaatu… and you can’t get more science-fictional a band-name than that. But, onwards…

There’s an excellent article on the New Scientist website Why space is the impossible frontier, which makes clear quite how hostile an environment outer space is. Space travellers can expect to suffer from atrophy of the heart (one week in space is quivalent to six weeks bed-ridden), loss of muscle volumne (six months in space leads to a loss of 32 percent of leg muscle power), and bone loss (about 1 to 2 percent per month). About one in ten space travellers can expect to develop cancer.

There are other hazards: micrometeroid strikes, solar flares, the fact that humans can only survive in a manufactured environment… And, to make matters worse, getting out of a gravity well is expensive, which means those environments must be as light as possible. The walls of the Apollo LM were famously thin – an engineer dropped a pencil in one while it was still at the Grumman factory; the pencil went straight through the wall. The entire craft weighed only 30,000 lb. That’s about as much as three African elephants. And two of those elephants were left behind on the Moon.

Charlie Stross has written in the past (see here; as have I here) how this shows the inappropriatness of the pioneer mentality when applied to outer space. Space is a new frontier; but it bears no resemblance to the old New Frontier of the Wild West. At present, the only means we have of colonising it is with our imaginations.

And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are blithely ignored. Spaceships magically travel out of gravity wells. Spaceships magically provide interior gravity. Spaceship hulls magically protect occupants from all manner of spaceborne hazards. And, of course, spaceships magically travel unimaginable distances within days or weeks.

Yet look here. It seems Panspermia as a theory has a serious hole in it. While life in some form, such as hardy microbes,  may be able to survive months or years in space, they’re not going to get very far in such timeframes. To travel between star systems could take millions of years. Not even a kevlar-coated microbe with an atomic pile for a nucleus is going to survive that journey. But its corpse might. And, providing radiation, etc, has not garbled too much of the information embedded in it, the microbe could be used as a template for life. So… zombie microbes. Zombie space travellers.

Some sf novels have suggested that only information – carefully safeguarded, of course – may be the only way to colonise the stars. The Orphans of Earth trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix springs to mind. In it, AI constructs based on real people are sent to various stars with exoplanets, and they then use robot bodies on arrival. Then there’s William Barton’s Dark Sky Legion, in which the protagonist travels dead from star to star, and is resurrected at each destination.

These are ways of dealing with the distances. Because the distances are vast. Sf writers and readers often lose sight of that. Take, for example, the heliopause, the point where the solar wind is too weak to push against the stellar winds of others stars. It’s approximately 100 AU from the Sun. That’s nearly fifteen billion kilometres. Voyager 1 is not expected to reach the heliopause until 2015, and it’s been travelling at around 67,000 km/h since 1977. Interstellar distances are orders of magnitude greater. Intergalactic distances are simply mind-boggling. There is a wall-shaped structure of galaxies some 400 million light-years from Earth called the Sculptor Wall. It is 370 million light years long, 230 million light years wide and 45 million light years deep. Try and picture that. It can’t be done. It’s impossible to imagine how long it would take just to travel its length. Yes, space is big, as Douglas Adams famously wrote. Human beings cannot travel to other planetary systems – space is too big. It’s also lethal. Human beings cannot survive in it unaided. At least, living human beings cannot survive. Perhaps the only well-travelled human is a dead human.

But, however humanity makes it to the stars, imagination will lead the way, and I think there’s plenty of room in the noosphere for stories which explore such futures with a more-realistic bent. Not Mundane science fiction; just “less magical” science fiction. I can’t think of a single sf novel which does not trivialise that first difficult step out of a gravity well. Perhaps the rocket, the brute force approach, is the most effective means of throwing something into orbit. Perhaps weight will be the most important limiting factor in interplanetary or interstellar travel – assuming all journeys start and end at the bottoms of gravity wells, of course… Well, living in space is untenable over the long term.

Instead of fighting aliens, or other interstellar empires of humans, it’s a battle for survival. The only enemy is the universe. And it’s a common enemy. If there are aliens out there, then they too will be fighting the same war. Why can’t we have more science fiction that reflects this? As Sir Arthur Eddington, an astronomer, said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. And yet sf writers seem content to refight historical wars in some sanitised and romanticised and safe imaginery place which is supposed to resemble the universe around us. They’re ignoring the unimaginable strangeness and the mind-boggling vastness of it all. They turned the Orion Arm into a shopping mall, and the Milky Way into Smallville. They’ve taken the wonder out of the real universe.

It’s time to put it back. Please.


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Another Catastrophia review

Library Journal have posted a review here of Catastrophia, edited by Allen Ashley. My story, ‘In the Face of Disaster’, is one of four from the anthology mentioned in the review. Although the review only gives a short précis of each of the four stories, it says the anthology is “inventive though somewhat uneven in literary quality”.

There’s also a review of LE Modesitt Jr’s new novel, Empress of Eternity, on that page. Library Journal apparently liked it a great deal more than I did – see my review in this month’s Interzone.


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Watch Death Watch

So I managed to get hold of a copy of Bertrand Tavernier’s adaptation – La mort en direct, or Death in Full View, or Death Watch – of DG Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. And I watched it last night.

The book was published in 1974 (I wrote about it here). The film was released six years later in 1980. It was directed by Bertrand Tavernier, and starred Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max von Sydow, and Thérèse Liotard (and a young Robbie Coltrane). Although the movie’s director is French, and the cast is international, it was filmed in Glasgow in English.

I think Death Watch is the first film by Tavernier I’ve seen. I was, of course, more interested in how it was adapted from the novel than in it as a film per se, but even so some parts seemed curiously inept. The editing is especially noticeable, featuring abrupt cuts which badly impact the flow of scenes. The cast also appear to be improvising… but after a night on the town and so suffering from bad hangovers. Some of the dialogue is not so much banal as downright phatic. In one scene, television producer Vincent (Harry Dean Stanton) picks up Roddy (Harvey Keitel) in his limousine. After settling into the car, Roddy asks with a smirk, “Did your handkerchief die?” Vincent gives an embarrassed laugh, and fiddles with the handkerchief poking from the breast-pocket of his jacket. Dialogue in books, plays and films rarely approaches realism because so much real-life dialogue is wasted breath.

The film also shifts the story from the title character, Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schenider), onto Roddy, the man who has had his eyes replaced by television cameras. The novel presents Roddy’s narrative in first-person, and Katherine’s in third-person, but Katherine is very much the subject of the story. She has to be for the ending to work. Focusing the film on Roddy makes it unbalanced. It is through Roddy’s eyes that we explore Katherine’s character, which means we should be looking out through them (as we do in the book). We should not see Harvey Keitel’s gurning mug plastered across the screen… Not that I’ve ever understood how Keitel manages to appear in so many well-respected films. He can’t act.

The film follows the plot of the book reasonably closely, although several scenes have been left out. Katherine is told of her fatal illness by a doctor – her reaction to this, and her husband’s response, are both treated quickly. Which makes her decision to run away, and so avoid appearing as contracted on the eponymous television programme, seem somewhat abrupt. She visits the Depot, a street market, and buys a disguise. She escapes her minder from the television studio (Robbie Coltrane), and spends the night in a church dormitory. This is where Roddy befriends her, and perhaps is one of the few scenes in the film in which Keitel does a good job. Together they go on the run, eventually making their way to Katherine’s ex-husband Gerald (Max von Sydow).

Few films are better than their source texts. Death Watch is not one of them. It is only when von Sydow appears on screen that the film feels as serious as its subject matter demands. Nor has Katherine’s character been built up enough to fully explain the choice she makes which ends the film.

Having said that, Glasgow makes suitably grim backdrop – although I felt the book deserved to be set in a town filled with Brutalist architecture. Its world felt grey and slab-faced, which Glasgow certainly isn’t. A couple of scenes were staged cheaply, and it shows in the sparseness of the set-dressing and extras. The acting is mostly good, but von Sydow is, as usual, excellent, and Keitel is, as usual, terrible. I’m glad I watched the film, but it’s not a patch on the book.


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Mentioned in despatches

It must be some sort of milestone in a writer’s career when something of theirs is reviewed in the national press for the first time. Today is that day for me. In the Guardian Reviews section, Eric Brown has reviewed the Catastrophia anthology edited by Allen Ashley, and in which I have a story. Eric mentions four stories from the anthology, one of which is mine, and writes: “…the more sober, literary examination of the breakdown of society when humanity suffers apperceptive prosopagnosia – face-blindness – in Ian Sales’s affecting ‘In the Face of Disaster'”. You can see the full review here.


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Looking backward from the Year 3000

I sometimes wonder if in the future they’ll look back at the 20th century as something of an aberration. During the 20th century, efforts were made, precipitated by two huge wars, to create just and fair societies for all – some using methods and ideologies more extreme than others. But the Soviet Experiment went down the pan, and most developed nations seem to be sliding down the slippery slope after it. We’re slowly returning to a world in which the privileged few callously exploit the masses in order to further enrich themselves and extend their power. In the old days, it was the royalty and nobility; now it’s the plutocrats and power-mongers.

Once they could use religion to control the great unwashed – and it still works in some places – but for many it no longer has the power in their lives it once possessed. So now they use the law. They’re putting in place legislation which undoes all those steps forward made in the past hundred years. And with the sort of bare-faced cheek only available to those for whom irony is an alien concept, they insist they’re doing it for our own good.

Which is not to say we’re not complicit. Popular culture celebrates the immoral profligacy of the rich, and heaps scorn on the poor. We admire the greed of the wealthy, when we should be angry at their squandering of resources, or their plundering of that which should belong to all of us. It’s all very well dreaming that any one of us could join their hallowed ranks – if, as they claim, we “work” hard enough – but we’re much more likely to find ourselves at the opposite end of the scale.

Science fiction and fantasy are as guilty as any other mode of entertainment. If sf can be characterised as ordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary worlds, then we too often fail at the “ordinary people” part. No one is Paul Atreides; no one can be Paul Atreides. We can only escape our humdrum lives by being what we are not: empowered. And in sf and fantasy, those powers are extraordinary. They might be technological in origin, they might be magical. But it’s not a utopia unless we have them.

You could argue that there’s no drama in ordinary lives; or that the drama simply isn’t big enough or, well, dramatic enough. No one wants to read about serfs when they can read about princes, no one wants to read about a cook’s mate 3rd class when they can read about the admiral of the space fleet. But this is patently bollocks. True enough, a serf can’t change the world – not unless they’re suddenly handed magical powers – but there’s certainly room for adventure. But then fantasy is not about changing the world, it’s about maintaining the powers of the few. There’s nothing consolatory in being a serf, and nothing admirable in perpetuating their condition. But as long as they have it good in the royal castle, that’s all right then.

So, where are the fantasy genre’s Robespierres and Marats? Why must every peasant-hero be privileged at the start of the story? It’s not even as if they “work” hard for it. It’s a gift, it’s like winning the lottery. And all they do with their new-found power is… keep the privileged few in power. Among which they now number.

Sf may have a slightly better record, but there are far too many tropes in the genre’s lexicon which fail to address societies’ imbalances. Sf should not be justifying prejudices. Celebrating individualism just means you think you’re better than everyone else. And you’re not; no one is. So why are there no stories in which the Great Social Experiment of the 20th century took root? Why must we all imagine that in the future corporations will be more rapacious than they are now? Where are the stories in which there’s no need for one group of people to slaughter millions of others simply to impose their will, or co-opt their resources? Where are the stories in which corporations are carefully regulated so that they can’t “accidentally” bring the Earth, or the Galaxy, to the brink of disaster? The stories in which sacrifice is a personal choice, not an imposed one?

Yes, many authors have tried. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, for example. Iain Banks and his Culture, perhaps… Except the Culture is a post-scarcity society, and has not so much redressed any inequalities as rendered them moot. Which is not the same thing at all. There are other examples. But they’re still a minority.

It’s bad enough the history of the real world is a catalogue of actions by the privileged few extending and/or abusing their privileges. I seen no reason why we should perpetuate this in genre fiction.