Adrian Tchaikovsky's Blog, page 22

Picocon & back

Picocon is a really nice little convention, for anyone looking for places to be next year. Imperial College put on a very good show — guest talks, panel discussion, destruction of dodgy merchandise with Science, and at no time whatsoever was there combat to the death with fish.

Justina Robson and Tricia Sullivan gave a pair of very thought-provoking speeches about science fiction writing, where they wanted to take it and what directions other demands were pulling them in. Justina had a graph, and Tricia had a musical analogy. My own talk about perceptions of epic fantasy also went down very well, including the "how to write a generic fantasy epic" comedy spots, which were notably less tumbleweedy than I had feared. I will say I spent 2 hours the previous evening frantically re-writing huge sections of it, that turned out to be time well spent.

I am very grateful to Picocon organisers/staff/volunteers, as we writers were well and truly taken care off (1) throughout.

Nice also to hook up with Juliet McKenna and Paul Cornell — it's a convention that former guests tend to come back to as punters in later years, which pattern I may well follow.

And there was a quiz, and it was extremely tough. Even with Paul on side we scraped third place, and that was with a number of questions rather graciously featuring our own works.

But perhaps the most glorious result of Picocon for me was:

KNITTED TISAMON!

For which I have to thank Rosemary Warner a.k.a. Pufferfish, and I am still absolutely bowled over by this.

(1) Not in a Mafia way.

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Future visions

… grand title for glorified news post.

Quick event update: this weekend I'm guest of honour at Picocon alongside serious SF authors Justina Robson and Tricia Sullivan, and am going to have to make some sort of speech. I have no fricking idea what I'm going to say, a state of affairs that may persist until I stand up in front of people and open my mouth, unless I actually get down to it.

Picocon is run by Imperial College, London, but is open to all. I will be happy to sign stuff, and there are some panels as well.

I have given in and shelved my first Larp event of the season to pitch in at Eastercon, which this year has something of an epic fantasy flavour. I will be on a couple of panels, and maybe signings etc. I have been promised the chance to be in the same room as George R.R. Martin.

Within a week of that there's Alt Fiction in Leicester, and Fantasycon 2012 looming at some point beyond which, going by the flagship picture on the site, is apparently being held in the sea. Busy year.

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SFX 2012 Reportage part 3

OK so: the good people from fantasy-faction.com were good enough to collar me for an interview, focusing on the challenges offered by short stories, which interview will presumably be up on their site some time soon, and on the Saturday evening there was a Gollancz (/Orbit?) party that was crammed full (literally) of Names (not literally), although by that time I was somewhat beginning to flag, and the later evening was a bit more sedate for me, sitting around and chewing the genre-related fat with the Tor team and fellow authors

But I get ahead of myself. There was another panel that I want to have a look at. This was "It's not a story, it's a map!" and was about world-building, ish. Tagline was "does fantasy place world-building over character", but it did get hung up on maps as my earlier one did on elves. Although chair Juliet McKenna did try and put a pro-map case, with some support from David Tallerman and Ian Whates, there was a lot of anti-map sentiment from Gaie Sebold, Sam Sykes and especially China Mieville. I do a lot of maps, as you know, and I'd have had some pro– stuff to put in. To be honest, maps are a bit of a side-argument, but I would propose:

- on the "show don't tell"(1) basis, maps are a useful tool for the reader, in any story that travels around or involves multiple states/nation/etc. However:

- Maps that don't have anything off the edge of them so that the whole world is contained therein are bad maps, and will work against the imagination of the reader (and the writer)

- Maps that could serve as the contents page because every conveniently distinct little country is going to get a visit are also bad maps, and indeed such a howling cliché of epic fantasy that they get a derogatory mention in Diane Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Basically, maps are a tool subordinate to story etc (and indeed subordinate to world-building, see below) but a useful tool nonetheless, a reference and resource for the reader and (when you get long enough through a series and need to check your own consistency) the writer as well.

And that's most of what I wanted to say about maps. You don't have to have them. A stand-alone book doesn't need them as much as a series might because a series likely has much more legging it about the place. A book with a stationary setting such as a city doesn't need a map in the same way that one with multiple locations and/or hoofing it around might. I stand by my maps. I also confess to using an entire map in The Sea Watch as a mean-spirited piece of plot misdirection. Very meta of me.

So much for maps, and it's unfortunate that "maps" turned up in the title because much of what followed kind of got tangled up in the idea of a map as the symbol of all that is unholy. However what I really noted was something China raised about halfway through: His stance was that the "reality" of a fantasy world stops at the page — that asking "what happened next?" or "was there really a ghost?" or whatnot is a meaningless question, because what the author wrote is all that s/he wrote. His position was that it's a pointless exercise to look for the "reality" of the fantasy world beyond the author's intentions.

So, here we go. Disagreeing with Mr M is sort of entering an ass-kicking contest with a centipede (2) — and I wasn't on the panel so who knows what I might have said at the time? — but if I understood his point correctly, I disagree with it.

I think that readers are absolutely entitled to ask, "What happens next?" or "who lives over the hill." I think that putting this question in the map debate is problematic, because it leads on to "setting too much in stone" arguments. I myself, speaking solely for my personal preference, like worlds that extend beyond the story, and maps that extend beyond those locations the story visits. As China noted, M.John Harrison  - a writer that he and I both greatly respect — has kicked very hard against the mere idea of world-building. I'm not sure if he uses the phrase in the same way I do. In his succinct and elegant essay (quoted here and elsewhere) he feels the practice is an offence to writers and readers. For me, story and world have unfolded in complementary tandem, and the world beyond the boundaries of the story — as shown in chance mentions, nods, remarks or the rumoured origin of a stranger passing through — has been instrumental in inspiring the story's further development. Does that mean that I let plot and character suffer as I fetishise over the world?  I would say no. I would say that they are the richer and the more interesting for having a rounded world to be set in. Those fantasy series that I truly do not respect are generally those that don't take the time to build the world, but simply cobble it together from stock concepts and then just drive a similarly ill-shod plot through them. It's like the elves — too many writers use fantasy standards like elves and the like as a crutch that means they don't have to think about the world: Who lives in this nicely square country? It's elves. That's fine then. Everyone knows what elves are like. Nature, bows, interminable poetry.

Isaac dan der Grimnebulin in (of course) Perdido Street Station, trying to solve the problem of flight for his client Yag: "Well, first of all there's the problem of getting hold of insect wings big enough. The only insects big enough already aren't going to just hand'em over. And I don't know about you but I don't fancy fucking off into the mountains or wherever to ambush an assassin beetle. Get our arses kicked." To me, that is world-building. That is the essence of world-building, and those books (and all of China's books) are full of that kind of intricate, immersive detail. I'm not expecting there to be a painstakingly detailed place on the map that says "here be assassin beetles". There should always be something off the map, because that's how a world works (see how the map debate colours the wider argument?). I'm similarly not expecting whatever author to have a 4,000 word essay on the life cycle of the assassin beetle or to be able to give any more details than are on the page if they don't want to, but it is the mention of those far places, those rumoured things, that pushes back the boundaries of the world, that gives the story itself a reality that it would otherwise lack. And yes, I know I've lost the reality argument barring serious psychotic imbalance, because of course these places are not objectively real. But they have a reality beyond the page: they have a reality in the writer's mind, and the readers'. The writer must not (as Harrison says) restrict the reader by making too much concrete, but the writer also has a duty to draw the reader, to tantalise, to hint, to feed the imagination. That, as I'm sure the counterargument would run, is what character and story are there for. But world-building, as I think of the phrase, is a part of that. In providing a world that has the blush of life to it you show the reader that this is a vehicle worth exercising the imagination on. You encourage it. It is the world that the writer has not given that kind of thought to that cripples the imagination, because it has no depth.

And the interaction between world and story is complex. And over-planning is going to be restrictive — the world is likely to evolve like that "fog of war" you get in strategy games, so that the map (sigh) is revealed as your characters move around the world (which is why my later books have new maps).Yes, the story should not be to showcase the world. That is exactly cart-before-the-horse — or authorial masterbating, as Sam Sykes put it. However, a well-considered and consistent world showcases the story. And if you have that world, which grants your characters breadth and history and surrogate reality, then your readers will ask "what happened next?" I'm not going to go into detail about long serii like Shadows of the Apt needing more of that kind of stuff, but I think it's true just because writer and reader inhabit the same world for so much longer. Consistency and the suspension of disbelief require you to ensure that it all fits together.

And as far as suspension of disbelief goes, I feel that a fundamental part of reading a story — and most especially a fantasy story — is entering into a world that is presented as having a reality that stretches beyond what is written (3). On a literalistic interpretation, of course it need not have. The author can create that story and have no thought to anything beyond those words, or even be vehemently denying any "extended universe" — to use such a horrible phrase — with every word that gets typed. To expect the reader to somehow have that in mind as they read, though? It would be like interrupting a play half way through to show the audience backstage and see the actors smoking and going to the loo. To expect the reader to stop when you stop, at that final dot of punctuation, and never ask "what happens next" is to expect too much — and to expect something that would be actively damaging to the reader's appreciation of the story. Both China and Mr Harrison prompt that "What happens next?" question from me in all sorts of different ways. Harrison's Viriconium, in its own shifting and degrading detail, is fascinating. And yes, it changes story to story — it cannot possibly be mapped — but that change is in itself part of the fluid setting (perhaps I will be shot if I say 'world') that Harrison is presenting (see my references to it in my recent post here). That very uncertainty in the characteristics of Viriconium is an integral part and point of the story sequence (4). It is a valid reading. What do I say if Mr H tells me it is not a valid reading? I don't know, but the debate on author and authority (5) is one that all literature has fought over for a long time.

(1) Do not start twitting me with the anti-"show don't tell" thing. I know, it's not a universal rule, but similarly, sometimes it's better to show. The geographical relationship between places can be one of those times. If that makes any sense whatsoever.

(2) a buff, good-looking and incredibly erudite centipede.

(3) Yes, I'm sure there are works out there that very explicitly don't do this. My gut feeling, no doubt born of my ignorance, is that they will be reaching for a part of literature where art elbows out readability.

(4) So a follow-on point is that you can't expect every book to be a Viriconium. The fluid reality of the stories was, often explicitly, what the stories were about. If you start from a standpoint of "no reality to any story" then they actually lose much of their impact.

(5) Not one of Austen's better works. Too self-referential.

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SFX Reportage part 2

Saturday kicked off with entirely failing to catch the SF Legends panel because Rum but I did get the Urban Fantasy panel after it — Mark Newton chairing, and Paul Cornell, Sam Stone, Stacia Kane, Ben Aaronovitch and Benedict Jacka (whose Fated comes out shortly) discussing. Urban Fantasy is a hot topic for sure, but seldom actually put to rigorous interrogation. People usually hit the Twilight/True Blood button and then either love it or loathe it on that narrow definition. What came out of the panel was very much that as genre it is (a) nowhere near as "new" as all that — Gaiman's Neverwhere was back in the mid-90's and is absolutely urban fantasy, for example, it's just that there was no convenient label then for what he (and I'm sure others) were doing. (b) as an evolving genre, urban fantasy (formerly dark romance/dark fantasy) this area is entering rapid growth and diversification, probably to the extent that the hardline vampire romanticists will have to get their own sub-sub-genre (may I suggest reverting to "paranormal romance"?). There was a tentative attempt to broaden the distinction as far as "fantasy in an urban environment" which is what I always used to consider "urban fantasy" (1) — i.e. Mieville, Gentle, some Vandermeer maybe, that kind of stuff — but in all honesty I think that battle has been lost, and if there is any pressing need to slap a label on that sort of primarily secondary world stuff, it's going to need a new one (2). I'd be bold enough to say that "urban fantasy" as currently stands is basically "modern day real world fantasy with supernatural/fantastic elements" but the panel made it plain just how much ground that covers, as the various works of the contributors showed.

(1) Go figure.

(2) Whether genre-splitting labels are in fact needed is another debate. No point ignoring that we have them, though.

There was an interesting space opera panel after that — basically asking where the hell it's gone, aside from books. I missed about half of it for signing duties (cover sheets of the "Dark Currents" anthology I'm doing for Newcon Press (not Solaris, as I think I mistakenly said previously) and came in having missed a big chunk. One possibly mistaken impression I got was that other than the Black Library (Games Workshop's very successful publishing imprint) authors, who were happy to own to it, there was a distinct uneasiness at being "space opera" authors rather than "SF" authors. There is a perception — off the back of Star Wars if nothing else, which I always thought of as the quintessential space opera — that the science goes out of one window when the "opera" comes in the other. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

Next up — and I really want to get in on one of these — Ready Steady Flash!, in which Lee Harris gave out story themes to Paul Cornell, Juliet McKenna, Tony Lee and Stacia Kane, and gave them 5 minutes to write a story on each. Sitting in my comfortable seat in the audience I was all about the "yeah, I could totally…" but I guess it's rather different when you're actually fighting the clock. The results were very impressive — not only both funny and thought provoking (Juliet's were consistently good, I thought, and particularly Tony Lee's flash poem about the real reason for Anthony Head's delayed arrival), but a testament to good writing under pressure. Can't imagine any of them have an excuse to miss deadlines now…

Thanks to everyone who turned up for my signing slot, which was one of the best-attended I've done, and left me with I think 2 books unsold at the end of it (thanks particularly to Salvador for picking up practically the entire set. Always the path to an author's heart.) Forbidden Planet were selling out right and left, and I think the other booksellers (Abaddon, Angry Robot etc.) were likewise doing a brisk trade. China Mieville did comment that the "geek pound" seemed to be quite an economy-proof currency.

I didn't get to see Brian Blessed's piece, mostly, but by God did I hear him sing opera. There is no end to the man's talents, so long as those talents involve being very, very loud.

Part 3 to come, ish.

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SFX 2012 reportage part 1

(because there's a lot and I am trying to keep these damn posts short)

SFX 2012 — absolutely the best yet — as a convention they have been getting bigger and better since the first in 2010, and I was very happy to see that as well as the film & TV slots (1), the relatively small number of literary slots from previous events have been considerably expanded this year — and also that the audiences were there for those panels, with the larger spaces in Prestatyn being filled for book-related events.

(1) Interestingly, the schedule has never touched much on games, which surprises me given how much of an impact they have in the genre. Maybe that's yet to come.

And for once, while derailments and inclement weather between them seemed to have it in for anyone travelling anywhere over that weekend, coming from Leeds turned out to be an actual advantage. God's wrath was restricted to parts south.

I am vastly grateful to the staff at Tor, who really do look after their authors very well. The promised "cottage" was a failed-restaurant-turned-guest-house large enough that I was still getting lost there on the Sunday morning (2). My having a room to myself rather thank bunking up (3) with Mark Newton was more a testament to the size of the place than my standing as an author, I suspect, but probably to the considerable relief of Mark at any rate.

(2) Although with my sense of direction this wasn't actually much of a thing

(3) Originally: "Shacking up". Absolutely wrong choice of words.

My panel, "Elf Preservation", ably chaired by Jared from Pornokitsch, was good fun and well attended, but got stuck on the "fantasy races yea or nay" rather than the "magic yea or nay", so I never did get my Peake on as I had intended. Interesting debate, though, with Joe Abercrombie, Juliet E. McKenna, Graham McNeill and Gav Thorpe. In general a split over fantasy races (notably Joe more anti than pro but pondering writing a story with a Shanker main character, which sounds interesting). Scorn on the derivative, plaudits for the innovative, Juliet and I both bemoaning that people will slap the elf/dwarf/etc label on races that really aren't, and my noting that Games Workshop (for whom Graham and Gav have both written) have essentially reclaimed the orc(/k) so that theirs is now the gold standard that other people tend to take off (4).

(4) Not sure gold is the right word for orcs, but there we go.

Interesting history panel later talking about writing and research (and how it takes over your life) — including Pat Kelleher on WWI, Adam Christopher on the prohibition, Maria Dahvana Headley on Ancient Egypt and Paul Cornell on delving into London for his upcoming "Cops and Monsters". Paul was then rushed to the main stage for one of the absolute highlights — a genre-based "Just a Minute" that he was chairing, which was won by Joe "gift of the gab" Abercrombie against varyingly determined resistance from China Mieville, Sarah Pinborough and Toby Whithouse.

Friday night kicked off with Pornokitsch.com's "Kitschies" awards. Now, I have issues here. The website name and the award name and the, er, fact that they're giving away rather beautiful plush tentacles as prizes prepares you for something that's going to be tongue-in-cheek and a bit of a joke, but these were very serious awards being given out on the basis of real innovative contributions to the genre. Find the winners, and more info on the awards and the site in general, here.

Party at Tor place Friday night, very well stocked with Kraken rum, which was sponsoring the Kitschies. Memory of precise details of much of the later evening somewhat vague and rum-sodden.

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Convention Seasons starts here(ish) (Updated 27/1/12)

I now have some firm details on panels for SFX and Alt Fiction and there are some nice meaty subjects to get stuck into:

12pm Friday 3rd February at SFX, I'm doing

"Elf Preservation: without magic and monsters, it's not fantasy. Is it?"

Expect me to get my Peake on unless someone beats me to it.

UPDATE: I will also be signing at the Forbidden Planet Stand at 2pm on Saturday alongside Stephen Baxter — so come for him if not for me . If you grab me with books to sign at any other point I will be happy to do so, but you may need to bring your own pen.

There are some nice other panels at SFX that I intend to catch as audience. I particularly note a panel on World Building vs Character Building Saturday at 4pm, and the somewhat ambitious "WHO IS THE BEST PERSON IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY EVER" which is on at 10am Saturday. Depending on how Friday night went, if you bring some alka-seltzer, that person could be you.

At Alt Fiction later in April I'm down for "Diversity in Fantasy"  with Mark Newton, Anne Lyle and Jenni Hill (12–1 Sunday) (1) and also, to my immense delight, "Not another F*cking Elf" with Adam Lowe, Jenni Hill and Paul Cornell (11–12 Saturday), and I know it's only January, but that has just about made my year I think. Also full supporting programme, and a good looking one at that.

UPDATE: On the subject of Paul, he has kindly asked me to guest post on his blog today, and you can find musings on SFX and the series in general here.

On another note, if anyone out there is after a signed copy of any of my books but, for example, has never been in the same country as I have, or similar, ebay seller Koontz & the Gang (link is to Ebay store) currently has all the book in stock, signed, lined and dated and, I think, on sale for normal cover price.

(1) At this distance, all subject to change of course.

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Convention Seasons starts here(ish)

I now have some firm details on panels for SFX and Alt Fiction and there are some nice meaty subjects to get stuck into:

12pm Friday 3rd February at SFX, I'm doing

"Elf Preservation: without magic and monsters, it's not fantasy. Is it?"

Expect me to get my Peake on unless someone beats me to it.

There are some nice other panels at SFX that I intend to catch as audience. I particularly note a panel on World Building vs Character Building Saturday at 4pm, and the somewhat ambitious "WHO IS THE BEST PERSON IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY EVER" which is on at 10am Saturday. Depending on how Friday night went, if you bring some alka-seltzer, that person could be you.

At Alt Fiction later in April I'm down for "Diversity in Fantasy"  with Mark Newton, Anne Lyle and Jenni Hill (12–1 Sunday) (1) and also, to my immense delight, "Not another F*cking Elf" with Adam Lowe, Jenni Hill and Paul Cornell (11–12 Saturday), and I know it's only January, but that has just about made my year I think. Also full supporting programme, and a good looking one at that.

On another note, if anyone out there is after a signed copy of any of my books but, for example, has never been in the same country as I have, or similar, ebay seller Koontz & the Gang (link is to Ebay store) currently has all the book in stock, signed, lined and dated and, I think, on sale for normal cover price.

(1) At this distance, all subject to change of course.

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The Reality Gap

Not to be confused with SF series by either Stephen Donaldson or Peter F. Hamilton.

And, yes, they say make your blog entries short and pithy, but when I get my rant on it's hard to stop, Explains why the books tend to break the 200,000 word barrier, certainly.

And before I start, the Shadows of the Apt Wiki has just had a superb facelift, so go check it out!.

OK, apropos of nothing save my recent Christopher Priest binge, secondary worlds for real, or for make believe:

Getting past any initial objections about considering the reality of fictional worlds, when sundry children found their way into Narnia this was presented as a real place. You'd have to stretch the text past breaking point to find an interpretation where it was all, as Edmund originally claims, just a game, imagination by consensus. Narnia exists, insofar as the books are concerned. It's a real place, as real as the "real world", and indeed set within a wider multiverse of linked worlds (and aren't those parts of The Magician's Nephew actually more intriguing than actual Narnia itself?).

There are similar stories where the balance of probabilities tilts strongly the other way, though: that the fantastic world is the product of imagination, or even mental disorder. This can also be found in work intended for a younger audience. The film Bridge to Terebithia, for example, is pretty much impossible to interpret as a genuine fantastical encounter. Although we see the world the children "visit" it's  explicitly all in their heads.

Or the reality of the secondary world is up for grabs. Of the "big three," for example, Wonderland could go either way, although as it is essentially a satire (indeed a mirror, in the 2nd) of the real, a "realist" argument possibly carries more weight. On the contrary, Neverland and Oz are both presented as very real (save perhaps in the best-known filming of Oz, where they chicken out) and both Barry and Baum go as far as to present their fantastic worlds as superior and preferable to the actual one. It's a bold move that I think would cause difficulties today – the idea of children retreating into a fantasy world being a good thing would catch a lot of flak from conservative critics (1).

Fiction aimed at adult/older audiences also shows this uncertainty. Leaving aside Walter Mitty(2), whilst the phenomenal film Pan's Labyrinth looks on first viewing to be about a child escaping a traumatic home environment by taking refuge in her fantasies, it's quite possible to watch through on the basis that it's all real, and arguably that brings a more satisfying (certainly less depressing) closure to the film.

For me, I'm an unregenerate fantasist. A secondary world presented as a therapeutic tool or delusion to be escaped from in order to find wholeness is always a bit of a let down for me – "it was all a dream" sort of thing. Terebithia was a well-made film, and heavy with meaning and poignancy and all that, but at the same time the Scooby Doo of it left me feeling empty. Just my personal take, but I'll go some distance to find a reading that will give that world reality.

Iain Banks pulls some interesting sleight of hand with some of his early "mainstream" books. On the face of it, The Bridge is a look into the damaged mind of an accident victim trying to find his way out of his own injury, and that's the standard reading I think. The world of the Bridge that we're presented with, however, is fascinating and bizarre, a kind of mix of Kafka and Gormenghast stretched over the unending structure of the title – it seems almost too much to be just a fleeting construct. The world is a satisfying one in its own right (lord knows there have been straight out secondary worlds with less depth (length, breadth?) than that of the bridge.)

What precisely is going on in Banks' Walking on Glass is even more uncertain. It's like Lao Tzu and the butterfly – anyone's guess as to who is dreaming who. Banks, of course, has something of a unique relationship with the bookshelf, having his two personas, ostensibly genre and non-. Whilst a number of his "non-M" books are solidly rooted in the real world, one wonders how much of a sly game he's playing with the critics. Transitions, the latest "non-M", has a great deal of topical relevance, but although it sits there on the general fiction shelves it's surely a stretch to read it as anything other than flat out world-switching science fiction. With that in mind, it's worth a re-reading of The Bridge and Walking on Glass with an eye to the reality of the fantasies presented.

The secondary world can also decline in reality as a series goes on. M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence, for example (3), kicks off with some epic far-future dying earth fantasy that could link arms with Jack Vance or Michael Moorcock, but each iteration of the setting brings more uncertainty and a greater distance. The very reality of the world is explicitly malleable, the issues at stake become more nebulous and less epic, the heroes less classically heroic, until we are left with "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", locked out of the world that we have known, left with nothing but the real, and maddening, unfulfilling whispers. At the end of our journey, we are forced to ask if any of it was actually real, or just our own delusion (4).

But it can go the other way. I give you Christopher Priest's The Affirmation, where the main character is a Londoner who has a breakdown and ends up torn between the demands of the real, and the fantastic "Dream Archipelago" as he tries to address his own past and identity. Simple. Except it's Priest, so it's not at all. The protagonist has written an 'autobiography' that is not only inaccurate but takes place in the Archipelago, another world. The "him" in the Archipelago has memory issues and has to rely on an account he wrote that is set in our world. Although I suspect the mainstream reading of the book is "real world man with mental health issues suffers from delusions" it can be read the other way, it really can.

And then Mr P brings out The Dream Archipelago, and, very recently, The Islanders, the first a collection of stories set in the Archipelago's fully detailed world (with no concessions at all to the real one) and the second a purported travel guide interspersed with short fiction, much of which relates to the stories and characters of the original, making the whole enterprise something remarkable and possibly unprecedented as a literary endeavour. But the Archipelago has its own reality, however much it cannot be mapped or quantified.  It is that rare thing, a modern secondary world – not an alternate history, not a possible future, but a world that (post-Affirmation) has no concrete link to ours, and yet is recognisably on a par with our 20th/21st century existence (5). Indeed — and with the caveat that, like Gene Wolfe, you can't take anything Priest writes at face value — arguably Islanders is more fantastic than Archipelago – there's one story pair, mentioning no names, where the Archipelago original seemed to be strongly indicative of repressed traumatic memories in the narrator, but where it's Islander "counterpart" pretty much says, "No, that horrifying crap was real." Priest has therefore given us a world that has gone from a dream of mental imbalance to a self-contained reality over three volumes. Of course, his next one, should he revisit the islands, might turn it all on its head again.

(1)   Unless, possibly, that fantasy world had strong Christian overtones.

(2)   Unrelated, but it is an odious thing when someone is described in the press as "something of a Walter Mitty character," because this seems to be wheeled out specifically to describe a shyster who has taken advantage of other people and ruined their lives, but whom we are apparently supposed to dismiss as a harmlessly deslusional/loveable rogue. Digression over.

(3)   Firmly on my list of "You Must Read This" books/series.

(4)   The reworking "A Young Man's Journey to London" (in Things that Never Happen) is cited by some reviewers as Harrison 'making peace' with his earlier genre work, and though I can't comment on this, not being up on the history, it's a welcome reading but not what I took away from the story. To me it seemed to be continuing the trajectory of the original story, taking us further out and killing/excising Viriconium altogether. I found it an unsettling read but I'd be happy to find I was reading it wrong.

(5)   There is a whole extra post in this topic.

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All sorts of stuff roundup

Firstly, for those waiting for the regular paperback format of Heirs of the Blade, the arrival of a box of author copies informs me that this will be released soon (Amazon says 2nd February(1)). Anyone wanting to get the first signed copy can shanghai me (2) at SFX, as they should be about for that weekend.

Secondly… (dramatic chord) … I have started the second chapter of book 10 today! I was under the delusion that it was the first chapter when I wrote it, but have had second thoughts since. The last book in the series promises to be somewhat nerve-wracking to write. Y'know, no pressure…

I have had sight of a draft alt fiction schedule. I'm down for "untitled fantasy panel". Kind of hard to research that topic, but watch this space.

Lastly, an article in today's Metro (3) that provoked some bewilderment. "Dust off that novel, new app could make you a best seller." This is Apple's "Author" app, and my real beef with the article was the discrepancy between what the headline seemed to promise and the subsequent proud reportage, stated in such a way as to imply that this is the app's primary source of authorial gold dust: "It allows users to drag a word file into the programme, which automatically lays it out with the appropriate chapters and headings." I mean, thank God! Because where the chapter headings go is always the part of the writing process that really causes me difficulties.

Apparently it's all very multimedia, allowing easy inserts for videos (4) and things, and anything you make with it will only be marketable via Apple's own iBookstore/iTunes outlets, which promises controversy.

(1) Yes, I get my information on when my own books are being released from Amazon. This is the world we live in.

(2) On second thoughts I'm not entirely sure what that means. Just accost me instead.

(3) If you're wondering, it's a free newspaper randomly distributed about the UK's public transport network. It has Nemi in it.

(4) This seems to be an alarming attempt to up the ante, especially for epic fantasy. Am I supposed to be collaborating with Peter Jackson on my next one or something? (5)

(5) If you're reading this, Mr Jackson, seriously it would be an honour

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Gemmell Award 2012 Nominations

They're in! And both the Sea Watch and Heirs of the Blade are on the long list for the Legend Award (best book) (1).

These are the fantasy awards, after the David of the same name, voted for by you, the readers.

If anyone would like to support the home team (2), voting is accomplished here. Also up for grabs are the Morningstar Award for best newcomer and the Ravenheart award for best cover art. Go cast your stones (3)!

(1) Can you say "Split vote"?

(2) Or, you know, vote for someone else, but I may never forgive you.

(3) Now I've written that, it looks weird.

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