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Mentioning wolves reminded me of this current scheme to return a little bit of Scotland to its original state of wildness, complete with the wolves, bears, lynx etc. our ancestors wiped out (albeit behind big fences). Fair to say, as plans go, it’s not met with universal, unreserved approval.

Every so often, someone raises the possibility of re-introducing the wolf to Scotland. The idea never makes much headway, though there’s a lot of people, including me, who find it vaguely appealing. Unfortunately, it’s my heart rather than my head that likes the idea. It’s been a good 300 years since wolves disappeared from the UK, and bringing them back would be trying to rewrite history on a fairly major scale. Even though lots of people think of the Highlands as wilderness, the truth is there are too many sheep, cattle and lucrative shooting estates up there for a big predator like the wolf to be welcomed with open arms. I’m a great believer in the idea that the needs of wildlife should sometimes be given priority over the needs and preferences of humans (seems only fair, since we’ve spent the last few thousand years prioritising ourselves over all other living things), but the obstacles to wolf re-introduction are almost certainly overwhelming.

It’s fun to daydream, though, and it would be a dramatic scene: wolves and red deer stags locked in life or death struggles on the slopes above Loch Ness. That would really give Bill Oddie something to get excited about on his TV shows …

Anyway, here are some links to other – slightly more practical and important – efforts to help wildlife maintain its toehold on these crowded islands:

- re-wilding and large area conservation, for example this sort of thing

- greening the cityscape

- species recovery projects, for spectacular things like ospreys and cranes

- maybe the odd little bit of (non-wolf) re-introduction, just for fun.

New Year, new desktop pic staring at me from my PC, for the next little while at least:

Because I like wolves. Some were originally scheduled to appear, in a manner of speaking, in the Godless World trilogy, but their part is amongst the big, sulking pile of material that ended up on the cutting room floor during the revising and rewriting process. Poor doggies. They belonged in a completely different story-that-will-never be, what you might call the ‘magic and monsters’ version of the trilogy. It had some good points, but overall I couldn’t get it to work.

‘Be prepared to kill your darlings’ is one of those bits of guidance that aspiring writers stumble over everywhere they turn. It’s good advice. I came over all brutal while writing and rewriting Winterbirth (with, I should add, the assistance and approval of agent and editor at certain points). Plotlines, characters, scenes, themes, all germinated, grew and then got savagely scythed down by this author in search of a vaguely functional novel. Arguably, the more affectionate a writer feels about a character or a sub-plot, the more critically he or she should probably view its claim on page space. I don’t regret any of the changes or excissions I made. But I can’t deny a little bit of nostalgia for those wolves.

I got the image from here, by the way.

Can’t beat a new desktop pic for freshening up a stale computer, so the backdrop for my writing efforts this month will be:

A tinkered-with image of the very cool roof of the Royal Museum, part of the National Museum of Scotland. I’m sure you really wanted to know that.

EDIT to add: there’s something very pleasingly organic about the structure – makes me think of a skeletal whale’s ribcage, or the (upside down) rotted keel of an ancient boat some king was buried in …

They don’t mention it in the small print, but blogging software comes with invisible mind control coding which infiltrates your synaptic networks and gradually makes you believe that other people really, really need to hear your opinion on things. My resistance to this malign effect is temporarily faltering, so here’s a movie/TV round-up.

Casino Royale: enjoyed it more than any Bond movie I’ve seen in a while (and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those responsible for the two very fine Bourne movies – they pretty much forced the Bond producers to reconsider what they’ve been doing to the franchise over the last decade or more). It’s not perfect by any means – a bit too long, I thought, and it loses some of its energy and direction in the last half hour or so – but its strengths more than compensate. Daniel Craig is definitely one of those strengths. Not sure how those who’ve grown up liking their Bond movies more OTT than this are going to feel about it, but all in all Casino Royale’s rekindled my virtually comatose interest in things 007ish.

The Prestige: loved the book (highly recommend it if anyone’s looking for something to read), and the film’s a good interpretation of such a complex, atmospheric text. Hugh Jackman’s on pretty good form, but the director’s the real star: Christopher Nolan might have made a bad film at some point, but if so, I haven’t seen it.

Pan’s Labyrinth: definitely memorable. A mix of visually striking fantasy elements and really quite brutal and very definitely non-fantastical strife set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Recommended, so long as you have a reasonably high tolerance for witnessing physical and emotional distress. A distinctively European film – where else could you get quite the same rich stew of fairy stories and vicious 20th century history to draw upon? Well, Asia probably. Speaking of which …

Princess Mononoke: anime, watched on DvD. Man vs. Nature, in a very literal sense. It’s got something – can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but it’s definitely something. It feels, at times, like myth-making of considerable power, and despite its occasional oddities (to Western eyes, at least) in terms of plotting and character motivation/development, it never comes across as anything other than grown-up film-making. Some of the animation is exquisite, too.

Torchwood: the US gets Buffy, Angel, X-Files, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 etc. We Brits get Torchwood: the implausible adventures of the most sex-obsessed, dim, indisciplined and downright ineffective secret investigators the world has ever seen. I mean, if these guys are all that stands between the human race and disaster, we might as well all drop everything and head down the pub to enjoy what little time we have left. Actually, the last three or so episodes have been a slight (but only slight) improvement, so things are on a bit of an upward trend. I’m still feeling a bit short-changed, though.

Forgot to mention a couple of links were added to the relevant page a little while ago: the Falcata Times and the blog of the Write Fantastic, a collective of British fantasy writers. Which made me wonder what the collective noun for fantasy writers is. Maybe ‘tolkien’, as in ‘I had to throw a whole tolkien of fantasy writers out of the pub last night’.

Favourite collective nouns from the animal world: a charm of finches, a murder of crows. Apparently the name for a group of buzzards – birds I previously admitted my liking for - is a ‘wake’, which sounds good but I’ve no idea what its origin is. In fact, A Wake of Buzzards would be a good title. Not nearly as good as A Murder of Crows, of course, but that’s already taken several times over.

And, wholly unconnected with that (I’m rambling here, as you probably noticed), exciting news for all British troglodytes. There’s a cool photo of it here.

The first two episodes of Doctor Who’s ‘adult’ spinoff Torchwood: Not too bad, I suppose (am I the only one who thinks alien sex vampires are a bit dull?), but got to admit I was – probably foolishly – hoping it would be brilliant. And it wasn’t, really. I can’t help but think it’s actually a kids’ show with an ‘adult’ skin grafted onto it. People get messily killed, there’s plenty of inter- and intra-gender mouth-on-mouth action, even some bonking. But all that’s just the bodywork; the chassis and engine underneath don’t feel quite so grown-up. The pacing of each episode’s pretty much flat-out, the plotting seems a bit reliant on people behaving like complete idiots and the characters talk and behave like unruly teenagers half the time (characteristics it shares with Spooks – a show that in the last couple of seasons seems to have given up all pretence of realism and turned into a live action cartoon, if you ask me. Which you didn’t.)

Basically, it’s Dr. Who with added sex and violence, which I suppose does make it an adult show, in the post-watershed kind of sense. It’s got potential, so I’ll give it another episode or two to really win me over. Makes me kind of miss Strange and Ultraviolet, though: brief UK efforts to do sf/f/h for grown-ups. In my possibly rose-tinted memory glasses, they both had a darker tone, a slightly more measured approach to cranking up the tension and characters who talked and behaved like adults engaged in at least vaguely serious business. Both disappeared from our screens very quickly. Not enough of us liked them, evidently. Which just goes to show … something. That my attention span’s too long, probably. Or that I’m just a grumpy old man (already? How did that happen?).

Can’t resist pointing this out: apparently we’re all going to be either elves or goblins in 100,000 years time. It’s been suggested to me that this makes you wonder if the guy who did this study played a bit too much Dungeons & Dragons when he was younger. Equally, it makes you wonder if he shouldn’t be reading a bit more science fiction now. All science is speculative fiction when it comes to the far distant future of the human species, but this strikes me as a particularly dull, unimaginative version. Do we seriously think that 100,000 years from now (that’ll be, oh, about 333 times as far into the future as the very first industrial steam engines are now in the past) the most dramatic changes in humanity are going to be that half of us are tall, pretty and bright and the other half are squat, ugly and dim? My money’s on something a bit more drastic having happened by then. Maybe we’ll all be disembodied minds living in elaborate tin cans, or genetically over-engineered 250-year-olds with too much time on our hands, or spindly giants trotting around a terraformed Mars. Or extinct, of course. To be honest, if this really is what the best of us are going to look like in the future, extinction doesn’t seem such a totally bad idea.

Nice review of Winterbirth in The Times over the weekend, which was particularly pleasing because it’s comparatively – and given that The Guardian has dropped its similar sf/f review column, perhaps increasingly – rare for the genre to get even this kind of quite brief mention in the ‘quality’ press. I can’t get that worked up about this low level of coverage – newspapers have no duty or responsibility to cover anything they don’t want to, and plenty of other ‘genres’ don’t get drastically better treatment – but I am mildly curious about the reasoning behind it. As a wholly uninformed guess, I imagine it’s to do with some or all of the following:

(a) a belief that newspaper readers aren’t interested enough in sf/f to justify the column inches

(b) an assumption that sf/f readers only read sf/f, and will therefore look to more specialist outlets for info on new releases

(c) a belief that sf/f books automatically don’t have enough substance to merit more extensive coverage

(d) a personal lack of interest in the genre amongst those who commission the reviews

Others will know far better than me whether there’s any truth in this, but from a personal point of view, while I suspect there might be a grain of truth to (a) and (b), I’ve actually found sf/f readers to quite often be rather diverse in their reading taste and habits, up to and including newspapers! With that as a rather feeble excuse, I offer a random selection of recentish newspaper stories that I found interesting in one way or another:

From the footballing frontline: pigs seen sprouting wings. I’m still in a kind of delighted shock about this.

We’re all toast by the end of the century.

The latest ‘but is it art?’ installation to grace Tate Modern’s fantastic turbine hall. It sounds great to me – wish I could go and see it.

How much is a load of people showing each other short videos worth? $1.6bn, apparently.

Is this the price of investigative journalism in Russia?

This is a bit of an aside, but never mind – I’m my own editor here, and a lax one at that. It’s been a busy, autumnal couple of days overhead: skeins of geese, honking along in high altitude Vs; a big flock of lapwings paddling across the sky.

And a visit from one of the great success stories amongst Britain’s wild birds. Buzzards put in an appearance here fairly regularly, even though we’re on the edge of a pretty big urban area, and every time I see or hear one it’s one of life’s little pleasures. The buzzard’s voice is fantastic, the stuff of wild lands (and available for your listening pleasure here). When I was a kid, I didn’t see buzzards very often. A 20th century cocktail of persecution, not enough rabbits to eat (bad stuff, that myxomatosis) and toxic pesticides had hammered the population. Nowadays all those problems are, to some extent, reduced. Result: buzzard population explosion, especially in the last ten or fifteen years. They’ve been breeding like … well, rabbits, and are now close to being the UK’s commonest bird of prey, if they’re not there already. And if that means I get to hear them over my garden, I’m glad.

Go on, listen again. It’s cool – a little bit of wilderness on your PC.

Well … a real live website with my name on it! Life’s full of little surprises.

Anyway, welcome to any and all who find their way here, whether by chance or design.

There’ll be snippets of news, views and possibly incoherent ramblings appearing here, a lot (but not necessarily all) of it relating to my imminently-to-be-released first novel Winterbirth (Go! Buy! Right, that’s enough of that …) Elsewhere on this site you’ll find the usual author-related stuff: short bio, extract from the book etc. Make yourself at home. Comments and/or questions are very welcome – just click on comments below.

This being the first new item on the site, I guess there should be some news in it, so: Winterbirth will be on UK bookshelves in early October, published by Orbit. There are publishing deals lined up for a few non-English-speaking countries, too, but the timescale’s a bit longer on those, so news of them can wait for a later date …