A new edition of my Words and Pictures column is up at SF Signal, wherein I talk mostly about the best of the relatively few manga series I’ve read: Pluto.
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Tags: Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, Pluto
Been a little while since I did a Moving Pictures on a Friday post, so what about this?
Chances of this being the greatest movie ever made are pretty slim, I think it’s fair to say. But … it isn’t meant to be, and as trailers go I reckon this is kind of a masterclass. I’m not really the main target audience, though I’m certainly on the fringes of it (former comics collector, sf blockbuster fan etc.), so the good news for Marvel is this one minute clip looks pretty much like a bullseye, even to me.
What could anyone want from an Avengers movie other than snappy character interactions, spectacular action and tingly moments of superheroes doing cool and heroic things? Pretty much the best thing a trailer can ever do is say to its potential audience: ‘We know what you want and expect from this movie, and we’re going to give it to you. Big time.’
I still think cgi characters (i.e. the Hulk) are a bad idea, more often than not, but I’m willing to forgive it even that. If superhero comics were half as polished and focused about what they were trying to achieve as this trailer is, I’d read a whole lot more of them than I do …
Oh, and Tony Stark/Robert Downey Jr.? Superstar.
Tags: Avengers
Post-apocalyptic fiction is pretty popular these days, especially in its flesh-eating zombie variant, but – for no other reason than that my eye noticed a book on my shelves the other day – I’ve recently been thinking idly about a couple of older novels of the world gone to ruin. They’re interestingly different from, and similar to, each other and their modern counterparts.
These were both pretty famous in their day (late 40s for Earth Abides, late 50s for On The Beach), and I guess still are, to a rather more modest extent. It’s a while since I read them, but both are pretty firmly lodged in my memory; the tone and feel of them is, at least, if not every detail of the plots. They have more memorable ‘voices’ than a great many books.
Those voices, it’s got to be said, comes across as pretty dated these days, both in language and attitudes. In one way they’re quite modern, mind you: in neither of these books is there a great deal of optimism. Earth Abides is a good deal less bleak than On The Beach, but even so it’s – in one sense – a story of failure. Its hero wants to preserve or restore the norms of the civilized world, despite most of its inhabitants having succumbed to a plague. He fails (not really a spoiler, since it says as much in the back cover blurb of my copy), but does so nobly, and with dignity. The book closes with one of my favourite endings in all of science fiction: an elegy for the lost human civilization, as the natural world and the planet itself continue. Really, really good stuff.
On The Beach is a slightly different kettle of fish. It was written a decade later, by which time the threat of nuclear war was pretty much the only kind of apocalypse on anyone’s mind. Its end of the world is about as complete as you can get: a vast radioactive cloud, the result of global war, spreading gradually across the planet and killing everyone. Absolutely everyone. No brave bands of survivors holed up here or there. Everyone who’s not already dead is going to be, before long.
The last bastion of human life is in Australia, but the cloud is slowly coming closer and there’s no escape. No hope of last-minute salvation. If this book was being written nowadays, chaos would no doubt ensue. There’d be a complete breakdown of law and order, a wanton free-for-all. But in On The Beach, virtually everybody behaves really quite extraordinarily well. They mostly continue, in stiff-upper-lip 50s style, to lead ordered, restrained lives. Remarkably little really happens in the book. There’s a submarine voyage to look for signs of life in the northern hemisphere, but that’s about it in terms of what you might call ‘action’. Most of the novel’s about people quietly preparing themselves for the inevitable end; not just their own, but that of life itself.
That quiet, subdued tone of voice makes the few moments that really bring home the horror and desperation of the survivors’ plight all the more striking. There’s a very good scene where everyone decamps to a racing circuit for a final festival of motor sports, acting almost as if it was just a normal track day in a normal world. Except the drivers throw all caution to the wind, and practially invite their own fiery deaths. Because why not? They’re all going to die soon anyway.
What struck me, thinking about these books, is that they do something no modern post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve read does (and I should stipulate here that I’m by no means an expert of the sub-genre. I haven’t even read The Road, because … well, to be honest, I’m not sure I can handle quite that level of bleak these days). Neither Earth Abides nor On The Beach is exactly what you’d call an exciting read, although Earth Abides has its moments. Both of them are based on assumptions about human behaviour and the nature of apocalypses that seem a little implausible to the modern reader, and both are a bit old-fashioned in their writing style.
But if you can get past all that (not necessarily easy, I’m the first to admit), and let yourself go along with them, they do this thing that in my experience not a lot of modern sf novels do. They move you. No cheap emotional twists or contrived conflicts, no wanton torture of characters to induce the reader’s pity. Not that much grand drama of any sort. They just, in their quiet, persistent ways, move you. That’s a very powerful and – if you’re anything like me – pretty rare thing for a book to do.
Tags: Earth Abides, George Stewart, Nevil Shute, On The Beach, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
I have a new hobby on the internet: writing a column over at SF Signal, entitled Words and Pictures, wherein I plan to talk about comics and graphic novels of a speculative fictional sort. Do keep tabs on it if you’re remotely interested (or even if you’re not, since you never know: I might convert you into a comics reader!).
The awesome and slightly spooky power of Google Analytics tells me that there’ve been a trickle of new visitors to this site coming over from SF Signal, so I thought a quick orientation might be a good idea. For their benefit, and that of any existing visitors who don’t know quite how rich the loot to be found by forgaing around on this here website is (I’m exaggerating, but never mind).
The Books page, unsurpisingly, will tell you about my novels (details of my limited short story output are, inexplicably, over here instead). But there’s more! Check out the Godless World Gazetteer for background info on the world of that trilogy, including the maps that are in the books, an expanded timeline and various little pieces of writing.
Or, if your interest tends more towards the exciting historical-crime-thriller-horror-dark fantasy end of the spectrum, a good deal of the (historically accurate!) background to The Edinburgh Dead, my most recent novel, is compiled in a handy Photo-trailer compendium.
Google Analytics also tells me not many people are visiting my page of Links. This is sad (though I’ll get over it). Anyway, I’ve given it a little bit of a spring-clean, pruning a bit of dead wood and planting a few new saplings, so do check it out.
Tags: Words and Pictures
I am a naughty, naughty reader. Even knowing that, these days, it takes me a looong time to reach the end of a novel, I’m apparently incapable of resisting the urge to have more than one book on the go at any given time. Sometimes three or four, in fact. As a result, books often languish for months on my bedside table, silently bemoaning their misfortune of having fallen into the hands of such a reckless reader.
Still, perhaps a couple of them might be comforted if I go public with my affection for them. (And to be fair, I didn’t actually start reading them until December, so I’m not in exactly flagrant breach of article 3.2 of the Responsible Reader’s Code: Timely Completion of Books Once Begun). As I’ve not finished either of them, it’s possible they’ll go horribly wrong in their latter stages, but I think it’s unlikely.
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding is the kind of book I find myself more and more drawn to as I get older, and ever poorer in available time. It’s energetic, entertaining stuff that carries you along very comfortably at a decent pace. A sort of blend of fantasy, steampunkish sf and pirate romp, it’s got a faintly indiosycrantic vibe to it that makes it almost, but not quite, like stuff you’ve read before (as did the other Wooding book I read and enjoyed, The Fade). Airships, golems, daemons, guns and swords abound in this tale of piracy gone wrong and brigands on the run. The characters flirt with being unsympathetically selfish and hard-nosed, but so far Wooding’s kept them just on the right side of that line, for me at least.
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald hardly needs me to trumpet its worth, since it’s been praised hither and yon from the moment of its publication. But I’m going to do it anyway, because when he’s firing on all cylinders – as he seems to be here, so far – I find Ian McDonald to be a quite extraordinarily good writer.
On a word to word, sentence to sentence, scene to scene basis he’s just brilliant. If anyone wants to know what science fiction looks like when it’s produced by someone who absolutely knows and understands the genre, but also has a mastery of written English to match almost any author of literary fiction, this is it. I’ve always believed that you might be able to teach someone to write fiction competently, but you can never instil in someone an instinctive ear for the intricate ebb and flow of prose, and the rhythms of description. An author’s either got that somewhere inside them or they haven’t, and McDonald’s got it in spades.
Near-future Istanbul is the setting for this multi-viewpoint exploration of nanotechnology, urban history, terrorism and old mysticism. On balance, I think it’s the best stuff I’ve ever read from McDonald, and that’s saying a whole lot.
Tags: Chris Wooding, Ian McDonald, Retribution Falls, The Dervish House
I came to a startling (for me, anyway) realization a few weeks ago. It was this: of all the entertainment channels available to me in this media-saturated world, the one that I actually spend most time being entertained by is podcasts. Yes, I spend more time listening to podcasts than I do reading, watching TV, whatever.
The reason’s pretty obvious, when you think about it. Audio is the one form of entertainment you can slot into a multi-tasking arrangement, so I can consume podcasts while driving, walking, shopping, picking my nose etc. Now I could do the same thing with radio, of course – and to some extent I do – but being a podcast junkie is like having in my pocket a constantly available radio station wherein every single bit of content has been personally selected by me to conform to my eclectic tastes. Awesome, in short. I’ve thought for a long time that podcasting is one of the more under-rated wonders that the internet has delivered to us.
So, I thought I’d embark on an occasional series of posts here highlighting podcast episodes I’ve listened to and enjoyed recently.
To kick things off, I offer up for your consideration Astronomy Cast #246.
My favourite recent edition of an often interesting podcast, in which knowledgeable folks discuss a question of interest to armchair astronomers, science fiction fans and writers alike: What If Something Was Different? By which they mean, what would be the implications for Earth, life and everything if some of the circumstances surrounding our planet’s location, evolution or condition had been different. They address all sorts of stuff from the cosmic – what if the Earth’s Sun had been one of those formed in the very, very early stages of the Universe’s life? – to the more local – what if Earth had a different number of moons?
It’s mind-expanding stuff, not only in making you think about seriously big picture stuff and providing a bit of pretty accessible cosmological education, but also in marvelling at the capacity of the human species to ask, and at least partially answer, questions like this. If you feel your mind could do with a bit of expansion today, do go give it a listen.
Tags: Astronomy Cast
… who knows? The world the aspiring writer’s confronted with is a less structured, less restrictive, less certain place. That, plus I’ve maybe changed my mind a bit about some of the stuff that used to be taken for granted ten years ago, back when I was scavenging for info on how publishing worked and what I had to do to get a seat at the table.
1. Start with short stories. This one was probably holed below the waterline even ten years ago, to be honest, but at some point before that it certainly used to be the prevailing wisdom that when it came to speculative fiction, one sensible route map for launching a career was to sell some short stories to the magazines and then ‘graduate’ to novel writing. My impression is that nowadays a much higher proportion of novelists skip the short fiction stage and jump straight to novels.
There are all kinds of reason why it’s changed, but I suspect one of them is that there’s a much higher proportion nowadays of potential sf and fantasy novel readers who don’t pay attention to the short story outlets (new or long-established). That, in many ways, is a good thing: the potential audience for the spec fic novelist has expanded far beyond the core audience of genre fans. Personally (and despite rarely writing them myself) I still think short stories have enormous value as a craft-honing exercise for the aspiring writer.
2. You need an agent. Well now. This one’s complicated, and still – I’d say – more true than not. But … but … the writing life’s changing fast, and the role and place of the agent is as much up for re-evaluation as any other aspect of the publishing business, now that the digital revolution is well and truly underway.
There’s the obvious self-publishing issue. You don’t need an agent to get your novel in front of millions of paying customers now that the e-book is gradually becoming the key medium. Unless you’re super-sharp and super-confident, and have plenty of time to spare, you probably still need one if and when the time comes to talk contracts with a publishing house (and most of them are, anyway, still very reluctant to look at unagented submissions as far as I know), but even then I wonder what the future holds.
One of my strong suspicions about this brave new digital world is that mid-list authors being published by the big publishing houses are facing an uncertain future. Even if you can land a contract, my guess is that absolute income for mid-list writers is more likely to decline than rise in coming years, due to some combination of lower overall sales and/or the inevitable continuing downward pressure on e-book prices. That being the case, sacrificing a non-trivial chunk of your income to an agent might eventually start to look like a really good reason to develop your own bargaining and negotiating skills. Or your own self-publishing and marketing skills.
3. Advertising doesn’t work for books. I can remember hearing or reading this repeatedly a few years back. The consensus in the industry seemed to be that money spent on advertising a book was money that could probably have been more profitably used elsewhere (like buying high profile displays in bookshops, for example). What actually sold books was word of mouth, covers and name recognition. Advertising spend (posters, magazine adverts, whatever) existed to mollify self-important superstar authors and to front-load sales rather than increase them in absolute terms. I’m sure the situation wasn’t as simple as all that, even twenty years ago, but I’m equally sure it’s a whole lot less simple these days.
I’ve heard self-publishers and niche publishers say that Facebook advertising (paid Facebook advertising, not just social networking) can indeed move the sales figures for books. I can also see a scenario – in this connected, digitised, visual world – in which book trailers and other forms of online advertising, especially those designed to go viral, could have an effect. But mostly, when it comes to thinking about the future of book advertising, it just looks like one of the ways big publishing houses could justify their existence in a hostile future. If there’s any way of making book advertising work nowadays, I imagine they’re working and thinking hard to try to find it.
4. Publishers and agents have to love a book to take it on. I was always slightly sceptical about this one, which you still hear now and again. Not because I mistrust what publishers and agents say, but because the whole thing’s a business, right? There are undoubtedly plenty of agents and publishers around who would decline involvement with a book because they don’t personally love it, even if they can see that it’s commercially very promising. More power to them, I say. But I’ve no doubt there are also plenty who are very happily, and sensibly, working hard to turn books they’re personally not exactly wild about into the bestsellers they believe they can be.
The very small publishing houses, who have their costs under ferocious control, can afford to be picky and choosy, restricting their publishing projects to those in which love of the material plays a major part. The giants of the industry, which their overheads and mutlinational corporate masters – maybe not so much, in the testing years to come. I mean, when the only certainty is uncertainty, would it really make sense to merrily turn down a book that looked like a seriously strong commercial prospect just because you didn’t absolutely adore it yourself?
5. Aspiring writers shouldn’t try to follow trends. I can think of a couple of reasons this used to be said, back in the day. First, the time lag involved in writing a novel, submitting it to agents/publishers, revising it, getting it published and onto bookstore shelves, was so enormous that whatever trend the author had been aiming at had probably gone the way of the Titanic by the time their magnum opus actually saw the light of day. Second, agents and publishers often seemed to be saying, in public, that what they really wanted to see was new stuff, not retreads of stuff that was already out there.
That trends exist, and persist, and are enormously powerful sales juggernauts seems indisputable these days. Steampunk and urban fantasy, to name but two. But what interests me more is the chaotic free-for-all that is the e-book market. Low-priced, often but not always self-published, novels abound on the e-bestseller charts, and they can very easily be written and published a great deal faster than print books ever could. Following a trend might starts to look more and more like an entirely sensible strategy, especially given that price and availability are quite clearly non-trivial factors in the aggregate purchasing decisions of e-book consumers, and perhaps more so than anticipated quality.
But me, I’d still say to any aspiring writer: ‘Write whatever you want to write. If it’s similar to a lot of other stuff already doing well in the market, there’s no harm in that. If it’s utterly unlike everything that’s ever been published before (unlikely, but you know what I mean), go ahead and write it. It might turn out to be a triumph or a tragedy, but you’ll never know until you write the thing.’
6. It’s not about luck. Creating and sustaining a writing career has, I suspect, always been about three things: talent, persistence and luck. I used to be pretty confident that luck was the least important of those. I’m no longer so sure. I am pretty sure that – even if it wasn’t always the case, which it probably was – persistence is now the only one of the three that’s indispensible. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Tags: The Ebook Revolution
Something of an edinburgh tradition, for those not incapicitated by the excesses of the night before, to take some fresh air on New Year’s Day. Most often it means stretching your legs on Arthur’s Seat, our local hill. Provides some nice views, as well as a bracing introduction to the year just begun. Here’s what it was like on January 1st, 2012.
Bright and breezy and c-c-c-cold.
Here’s to 2012, anyway. Who knows what it’ll bring, but I hope it’s a good and happy year for all you out there.
There’s a very upbeat review of The Edinburgh Dead over on The Bookshelf Chronicles. ( ’2011 is drawing to a close and I think I just found my favourite read of the year’ !)
Nice little exchange with the author of that same to review in the comments here, in which it turns out we both very much like one specific line in The Edinburgh Dead. And that line is … wait for it … wait for it …:
‘I’m not wanting any butter.’
Does that strike you as … I don’t know … a bit anti-climactic? It points up one thing that I’m sure isn’t particular to me. Lots of writers must have the same thing. That thing is that the pleasure of writing, the satisfaction that the finished text can give you as its creator, is sometimes as much about the small things – the small victories – as it is the big picture stuff. That tiny little line of dialogue gave me pleasure when I wrote it – you’ll just have to take make my word for the fact that it’s just the right length, tone and rhythm for its context – and it’s nice that someone else liked it.
(And in case that sounds too self-congratulatory, I’ll just note in passing that the small defeats can be just as frustrating as the small victories are satisfying. Witness: I can’t spell the word ‘rhythm’. Never have been able to, probably never will. Every single time I write the cursed word – including in the last sentence of the previous paragraph – I have to check its spelling. Pathetic. I’m already starting to fret it still doesn’t look right … maybe I should just have a quick double-check …)
Over at the Writers Read blog, I’ve got a guest post reporting on what I was reading in November. It includes Fascist dictators, etchings and horses.
And a very nice giveaway is open for the holidays – for those of you living in the UK and the US, at least. Over at the Orbit blog you can enter a draw to win one of five sets of five jolly good books. Including The Edinburgh Dead. There’s two or three there I’d really like to read myself, but somehow I doubt I’m eligible …
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