Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 8

The Calm after the Storm (Different Storm, that is)

Tand’s man took longer dying than anyone expected, and he went hard despite the Warhelm’s painkilling powders.  Some horror of letting go in this haunted place, leaving his mortal remains here for whatever might stalk down these desolate boulevards once night fell.  His fellow freebooters reassured him as best they could, but their own faces were portraits in ill-ease and the dying man was no fool.  So they set out a few of the radiant bowls against the encroaching dark and stood or sat around in the glow they cast, trying not to listen to the mercenary’s slowly weakening trickle of gasped curses and groans.  Yilmar Kaptal was impatient to move on, but his protests dried up in the face of a grim stare from one of the other freebooters.  Archeth stowed her own impatience where no-one could see it, sat at another bowl instead and submitted stoically to the Dragonbane’s blue-lit ministrations with needle and thread.  Turned out, he was a nifty little seamstress when he wanted to be.

A little later, the fire sprite showed up, bright orange and red in the windy darkness.  It flickered about on the fringes of the company, like an embarrassed late guest shown in to a dinner already begun.  Egar noticed before she did – she was lost in the soft blue glow from the bowl.  He leaned across to where she sat cross legged and touched her on one knee.

“Hsst.  Our friend’s back.”

“About fucking time,” she said sourly.  Her wounds ached, and the dying mercenary’s dribble of imprecation and pleading was getting to her worse than she’d expected.

“Occurs to me,” said the Dragonbane slowly.  “It maybe went off to scout a route that didn’t take us in sniffing range of any lizard nests.  We should have waited up on that fucking ridge.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t.  Let it go, Eg.”

He said nothing, and they sat in silence together, listening to the dying man and the hoot of the wind in the architecture.  Presently, one of the other freebooters came over and made brief obeisance.  Archeth nodded bleakly up at him.

“What is it?”

“A boon, my lady. Ninesh asks if you can leave the walking flame here to watch over him in death.”

She rolled her eyes.  “Well, obviously fucking not, no.”

“Or then, if the demon at An-Kirilnar might be asked to send out another flame to do it.”  The mercenary made an awkward gesture.  “He’s delirious, my lady.  But it would comfort him to be told the lie.  It would help him to let go.”

Archeth remembered the stench of voided bowels and burnt flesh in the house at Ornley, the unending keening from the next room.  What Tand’s men had done to the islander – she tried to recall his name, but it wouldn’t come – and his family.  She couldn’t recall if this dying thug had been there or not, but she imagined it wouldn’t have made much difference one way or the other.  The mercenaries were all cut from the same grubby cloth – veteran soldiers of fortune, recruited by reputation for the expressed purpose of securing their master’s slave caravans, shipments and stables.  It was grim, brutal work and Tand wouldn’t have been choosing them for the milk of human kindness in their hearts.

She shot a glance at Egar.  The Dragonbane shrugged.

“If it gets us moving any quicker.”

“Oh, alright.  I’m going.”

She levered herself to her feet, wincing at the twinge across her ribs from the stitches.  She made her way over to the dying man and his companions, no clear sense of how she was supposed to do this at all.  Giving comfort had never been her strong point – too much stored bitterness of her own to carry around, never mind anyone else’s fucking pain.

Around the makeshift encampment, men stopped their conversations and watched her.

  Great.

  You walk, Archidi, you find the strength.  The Dragonbane’s words filtered back through her memory.  Some men don’t have that strength, so you have to lend it to them.

The other mercenaries shuffled back, gave her access.  The dying man looked up at her in the blue gloom, face beaded with sweat, breath sawing from his lungs in tight little gusts.  They’d pillowed him on his bedroll, put a blanket over his body and his wound, but he was shivering as if they’d stripped him naked.

She crouched at his side.  His eyes tracked the motion, she saw how he flinched from her, how he tried not to but could not prevent the impulse.  Burnt black witch.  She put a hand on his shoulder and he made a noise like the snort of a panicking horse.  But his eyes were on her face and his gaze clung there, fearful and wondering, like some almost drowned man staring at the rise of a grim shoreline beyond the chop of the waves he struggled against.

“You have fought well.”  The words were out of her mouth before she fully realised what she was going to say.  “You have stood against dragons.”

“I, I……yeah.  Fuckers got me good, Mom.  Got me good.”  The tormented features twisted.  “They, they, I couldn’t-”

“They are all slain now,” she said, astonished at the ease with which this trite rubbish spilled from her lips.  “And we are victorious, and, uhm, in your eternal debt for that victory.  You have given your blood so that your comrades might go on.  Among the Black Folk, that is a sacred act.  Know, then, that the Great Spirit at An-Kirilnar has also seen your sacrifice and will send a flame guardian to mark your passing.  Go to rest in pride.  From now until, uhm, the end of all days, the fire will stand here, in memory of your hero’s name and protection of your resting place.”

“I……”  A trace of clarity surfaced through the delerium in the desperate eyes.  “Is it so, my lady?  Really?”

“Really,” she said firmly.  She took one his scarred and callousd hands, pressed it between her own.  “Now go to good rest.  Let go.”

The mercenary hung on a little longer regardless, but his breathing seemed less panicked now, and he cursed less than he had before.  He confused Archeth with his mother some more, asked her not to leave him, asked her why her face was so sooted up, was anything wrong, had something happened to Bereth.  He mumbled to his comrades, and to others who were not there, told them all he was a hero in the eyes of the Black Folk, smiled like a child with the words.

Shortly after that, his breathing stumbled and then stopped.

They sat around him for a still couple of moments, just to be sure.  One of the other mercenaries leaned in and pressed fingers to the neck.  Held the back of his hand to the open mouth.  Nodded.  Archeth got up, a little stiffly.

“Right.  Do what you need to do for him.  But get it done fast, we’re pulling out.  This isn’t a safe place to spend the night.”

She nodded across at Egar, and the Dragonbane stood up, started barking orders.  The men scrambled for their gear, relief palpable in the sudden surge of motion.  She moved too, trying to shrug off the dead man at her back, but something of him clung stubbornly.  She paused on her way to get her pack, stood a moment looking back, watching the surviving freebooters with their dead comrade in the light from the radiant bowl.

They were frisking the newly made corpse for valuables.

 

*

 

The sprite led them a twisting, looping route through the darkened streets, following some planned path obvious only to itself.  Egar couldn’t be sure – cloud cover had crept in from the east with the night, and band and stars were muffled up in it – but he thought they doubled back and zig-zagged a lot.  The city became a maze around him, dim towering mounds of broken architecture and seemingly random twists and turns between.  Once or twice he saw the distant gleam of a camp fire out among the ruins, and the breeze brought him the scent of roasting meat, but that was all.  The sprite always veered well away from such signs.

For all the doubling back, though, they moved at a good pace.  The sprite flickered briskly on ahead, only pausing or coming back when they hit some awkward obstruction or bottleneck.  On these occasions, it brightened itself helpfully and hung about, darting back and forth, throwing warm reddish orange light across the falls of collapsed masonry or torn up street surfacing that were slowing them down.  Then finally, a couple of hours into the march, it led them up a series of detritus-strewn staircases in one rubble mound and out onto a broad, jutting platform forty feet above street level.  Surprised satisfaction muttered among the men.  The ruin they’d climbed through was mostly intact – it gave them towering vertical walls at their back, two hundred odd degrees of vantage point views out over the city to the front, and the single staircase entry point to defend.

It was pretty much an ideal place to make camp.

Yeah, and if you hadn’t been in such a fucking hurry earlier, Dragonbane, we might have been sitting here nine stronger than we are.

He sat cross-legged at the edge of the platform, away from the blue glow of the bowls and alone, glowering out at the shattered city skyline.  It was not normally in his nature to brood on such things, but the encounter with the lizards had opened a door somewhere in his head, and now all the long-stored memories of the war were back out to play.  Back in the Kiriath Wastes, back in combat with the Scaled Folk.  There’d been a savage intensity to it all back then, a vivid day to day urgency that, if he was honest, he’d thrilled to and still sometimes missed.  Now, faced with a hand full of the very same red-edged cards, all he felt was old.  As if everything he’d done back then, every battle he’d fought and scar he’d collected, had all been for nothing, and now it all had to be done over again.  As if something fanged and grinning dragged him off the mount of his fate and back down into a past he’d done everything he could to leave behind……

“See anything good out there?”

He glanced up at Archeth’s slim form and tilted, enquiring look.  Shook his head.

“More of the same.  I don’t think we’ve come all that far as the crow flies.  Going to take us a good few days to cross this shit heap.”

“Dodging the Scaled Folk as we go.”

“Yeah, that’s right.  Fucking cheer me up, why don’t you.”

She sighed.  Lowered herself into a loose sprawl beside him.  “It was an honest mistake, Eg, and we all made it, not just you.”

Yeah, but I’m the one supposed to be leading these men out of this mess.  It’s my job not to make mistakes that get them killed.

But he didn’t say any of that, not least because he was beginning to wonder if it was true.  They’d all walked into An-Kirilnar behind the Dragonbane, this rag-tag assortment of fighting men, but they’d marched out following a flickering Kiriath firefly and Archeth Indamaninarmal.

“Honest or not,” he growled,  “We can’t afford many more mistakes like that.”

“Agreed.”

They sat for a while, staring off the edge of the platform they’d reached.  She shifted and cleared her throat a couple of times.

“You see Tand’s guys turning out their dead pal’s pockets?” she asked finally.

“Yeah.  Took the rings off his fingers as well.  The old freebooter’s farewell.”  He glanced sideways at her.  “What, you were expecting speeches and flowers?”

“I was expecting…..”  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.  Fucking sellsword scum.”

“Talking to an old sellsword here, Archidi.”

“Don’t tell me you would have done the same.”

He considered for a moment, brooding on the skyline.  “Well, no, maybe not.  Not to a comrade-in-arms, anyway.  But hey, I’m a barking mad Majak berserker.  No accounting for the way us steppe barbarians act.”

She snorted, but he saw a thin smile flicker on her lips.

“Look, you don’t want to read too much into it either way, Archidi.  They sat his death vigil, they prayed over him while he was alive.  And it’s not like he’s going to miss any of that stuff they took.”  He gestured out over the ruined city.  “Not like it’d serve any useful purpose left out there with him.”

“Yeah, I know.”  The smile had flickered out, left her looking grim and tired.  “I just wonder sometimes, what’s the fucking point?  Here we are, trying to get everybody home safe, and for what?  So Tand’s thug freebooters can go back to bullying slave caravans up and down the great north road for him?  So Kaptal can get back to his high class whore-mongering and his blackmail around court?  So these asshole privateers can slink off home through the borders, sign on with a new ship and go back to their fucking pirating…..”

He nodded.  “So Chan and Nash and the others can go back to their job safeguarding the asshole on the Burnished Throne?”

“Well, that’s……different.”

“Is it?”  Another time, he might have left it alone.  But he was raw from the fight and the errors that had caused it, and twitchy from this whole forced march back into his own past.  “How is it any different, Archidi?  Jhiral’s a cunt, and you know it.  He’s every bit as big a cunt as Tand or Kaptal or any League pirate captain you want to name.  And the Empire pays a phalanx of its very best fighting men to stand around him and let him go on being a cunt without anyone able to touch a hair on his head, while you stand at his shoulder, whispering advice into his delicate little cunt ear.  Doesn’t mean we won’t try to get you and our Throne Eternal pals home, though, does it?”

That sat between them for a while, like the night and the cold questing reach of the breeze.  When the silence started to mount up, he glanced across at her, but she was still staring fixedly out into the darkness.

“You don’t understand, Eg.”  Quietly, but with a steely conviction infusing her tone.  “You don’t know what it was like before the Empire.  The whole south was just a bunch of fucking horse tribes slaughtering each other left, right and centre when they weren’t riding down out of the hills and butchering the farmers and the fishermen on plains, carrying off women and children as slaves.  The Empire put a stopper in that, it brought peace and law to the whole region in less than twenty years.”

“Yeah, think we got this lecture at imperial barracks induction.”

“Jhiral isn’t so bad, Eg.”

“He’s a cunt.”

“No, he’s a young man handed too much power too soon.  A boy who spent his whole boyhood learning to fear his own brothers and sisters and stepmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, never mind anybody else at court; a son whose father never had time for him because he was always too fucking busy off making war at one end of the Empire or the other.  You’re surprised Jhiral’s turned out the way he is?  That he acts the way he does?  I’m not.”  Voice rising now, an obscure anger piling onto the conviction, lending it force.  “And now he’s had to watch the whole race of magical beings that protected his father – that protected his whole dynasty before him – cut and run as soon as he takes the throne.  He’s the first one, Eg, the very first one who’s had to deal with that, since my father walked into the Khimran encampment nearly five hundred years ago and told Sabal the Conqueror’s flea-bitten thug grandfather that his bloodline were going to be kings.  Try and imagine what it’s like for a moment – there’s this five hundred year old magic carpet your family’s always had, to raise them up above the crowd and keep them safe and special, and now suddenly it’s yanked out from under your feet just when you need it most.  Jhiral’s the first one who hasn’t had the Kiriath behind him, building wonders in the city to amaze his people, riding with him to war to terrify his enemies, lending him weapons and knowledge and power, promising him that whatever happens, history is on his side.”

“He has you,”  Egar rumbled.

“Yeah, he has me.”  A mirthless sneer flitted across her face in the gloom.  “Every solid thing he grew up thinking he could count on turns to dust in his hands, and he gets me as the consolation prize.  One burnt-out, krin-fried Kiriath half-blood juggling five thousand years of heritage she doesn’t fucking understand.  Is that supposed to make him feel better?”

He shrugged.  “Dunno, he’s a cunt, isn’t he.  But I’d take you at my shoulder over anyone else I know with a blade, and be grateful for the company.”

The moment locked and held solid, until she broke it apart with her laughter.  He looked at her and saw in the low light the tear sheen in her eyes.  But she sniffed and grinned when she spoke.

“Anyone else you know with a blade, eh?  Thought that’d be Gil.”

“Well.”  He gestured.  “He’s got the other shoulder.”

And they both broke up laughing, loud enough that faces turned towards them across the blue-lit platform ruin.

But later, as they lay side by side in their bedrolls and stared up past the jagged loom of ruins into a clouded sky, she said very quietly  “You’re right, Eg.  Jhiral is a cunt.  But I can’t help it, I’ve known him too long.  He’s been in my life ever since he was a squalling little bundle I could lift on one palm.”

He grunted.  Bleakly, he remembered Ergund; playing raiders with him about the encampment when they were both not much older than six or seven; staring down at his mutilated corpse in the steppe grass two years past.  We’re all small and harmless once, Archidi.  But we all grow up.  And some of us grow up needing killing.

  You’re talking to a brother slayer here. 

  Let it go, Eg.  Let her talk it out.

He didn’t want to fight with Archeth, whatever spiky balls of rage might be rolling about in the pit of his stomach, looking for release.

  Yeah, save that for whatever’s waiting for us down the boulevard tomorrow.

  Or out on the steppe when we get there.

For the first time, he allowed himself to think fully about what he might find if he went back.  How it might boil down if he asked around in Ishlin-ichan, got word of the Skaranak and their herds and tracked them down.  How his people might react if he just showed up one night like some wronged ancestor ghost in the campfire glow.

  And put a gutting knife into that fucking buzzard Poltar.

“Probably held him in my arms more times than his own father ever did, you know.”  Archeth, still musing up at the clouded darkness overhead.  “Akal was never around when it mattered.  I still remember hugging Jhiral at four fucking years old, Eg, the night the Chaila pretenders sneaked into the palace and tried to murder him.  I’m clutching him to me, I’m trying to cover his eyes so he can’t see the carnage, trying to hide the fact I’m checking him for wounds at the same time, and he’s weeping, screaming, covered in blood from where I took down the guy that had him when I burst in, and all he wants is his big sister to come and hold him instead of me.  And I’m trying to explain to him that he can’t really see his sister right now, in fact, uhm, well, Chaila’s got to go away for a while.”

“Yeah.  Ten years in a House of Prayer in the Scatter, wasn’t it?”

“They pardoned her home after six.  Big mistake, as it turned out.”  Archeth blew a weary sigh up at the cloud cover.  “Fucking joys of Empire-building.  ‘course, by the time she came home, Jhiral knew what it was all about.  No way to keep it from him, and he’d survived another couple of attempts to scrub him out in the meantime, it was getting to be part of the palace decor.  When Chaila came back, he wouldn’t have anything to do with her.  Never let her even touch him again.  So, yeah, I look at all that and I think, sure, you’re right, he’s a cunt.  But what chance did he have?”

Rustle of blankets as she shuffled round to look at him across the small space between them.

“And he’s smart, Eg, that’s what counts.  He’s smart and he sees the point of the Empire.  You can work with that, you can build something on it.  Whatever bloody mess he makes protecting himself and staying on the throne, it’ll pass.  He won’t live forever, but what I can help him build might.  He’ll leave heirs, and I can work with them, give them the wisdom he never had the time to acquire, make one of them into the ruler he’ll never be.”

“Or,” he said mildly,  “You could just save some time and look for a better king right now.”

She sighed.  Rolled back to face the sky.

“What, throw out five centuries of stable dynastic rule, probably set off a civil war and let everyone and his horse think the throne’s up for grabs if you can just muster enough malcontents under arms?  No thanks, Eg.  I may not have a lot of enthusiasm for the way things are right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s better than the alternatives.  And I am done with bloodbaths.”

“You hope.”  He yawned, cavernously.  “Better put some big-ass fucking prayers behind that, you want it to stick.  Like a certain hardnose faggot said at Demlarashan that time – we live in bloodbath times….”

“….and looks like tonight is bath night.”  Eg heard the smile in her voice, the glint of the memory.  “He did say that, didn’t he.”

“Yeah.  Witty little fucker when he wanted to be.”

They were both silent for a while after that, staring up at the shrouded face of the heavens.  If the shamans were right and you really could read the future in the stars, then tonight was a shit night to be trying it.

“You think he’s alright?” she asked finally.

He thought about it.  “I think he’s alive, definitely.  Gil was a tough-to-kill motherfucker even before he started in on all this black shaman stuff.  Now, I can’t see anything short of the Sky Dwellers stopping him.”

“Or the dwenda?”

He snorted.  “Yeah, a whole fucking legion of them, maybe.  Which that asshole Klithren didn’t look to me like he had.”

She didn’t say anything for a few moments, maybe because they could both feel the shape of what was coming next.

“You didn’t answer my question, Eg.”

He grimaced up at the hidden stars.  “No?”

“No.  You said you were sure he was alive, but I didn’t ask you that.  I asked if you thought he was alright.”

Egar sighed, caught.  Said nothing, because, well…….

“Well?” she prodded.

“Well.”  He gave up trying to see anything in the sky above.  Turned on his side, away from her so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes.  “All depends on your definition of alright, doesn’t it.”

Jerky but Just About Alight or An Ode to Remembered Physical Joy (and a second, oblique shot at Read and Rec’d)

So I finally cracked and got an e-reader.

The trip out to southern Spain, this time by air and with luggage dominated mainly by soft toys and Fireman Sam paraphernalia, meant my permitted allocation of book space was slim to vanishing, and a blunt pragmatism did the rest.  The Kindle Paperwhite 3G slides into a jacket hip pocket, takes up about as much space as two smartphones side by side, and has a carry capacity of 1400 books.  Better yet, you can buy and pull down new books through the 3G network from pretty much anywhere in the world (well, anywhere I’m likely to be in the next couple of years, anyway) with about the same amount of fuss it takes to send an SMS text.  Takes a couple of minutes max, really.  For the record, I got Kameron Hurley’s God’s War, John Kay’s Obliquity and in honour of Iain Banks, a re-read copy of The Crow Road.  Later, I maxed out on electronically-available Hurley via her two Kindle Singles short stories Afterbirth and The Seams Between The Stars, got myself up-to-date with Lawrence Block via his two latest Matt Scudder outings All The Flowers Are Dying and A Drop of the Hard Stuff, and followed up The Crow Road with Stonemouth.  Currently reading Lavie Tidhar’s Osama.

(None of which stopped me buying Rupert Thomson’ Secrecy and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in newly released and bulky trade paperback editions at the airport, though.  Or Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides in a raffish second-hand book exchange in downtown Nerja.  More on that later.)

So – a couple of months on, what’s the verdict?  An e-reader convert?  Am I Kindled – crackling and burning with enthusiasm for the form?

Uhm, well……

Here’s the thing.  The Kindle is ultra convenient, easy to use, restful to read from, just as promised.  It has adjustable text size at the tap of a screen, which, for someone just setting out on the sour, mid-life adventure of using reading glasses, is a bit of a blessing.  It doesn’t need light to read by, it doesn’t need phone credit for download (Amazon pick up the 3G costs as part of the deal) and it doesn’t need re-charging very often.  It’s a miracle of the modern age, no question.

But it isn’t a book.

You might be forgiven for thinking that’s pretty fucking obvious really, Richard, but if the last couple of months have been anything at all for me, they’ve been a belated rediscovery of the manifold pleasures of the reading experience – and that rediscovery has come, as often as not, via the absence or at least the weakness of some of those pleasures in the e-reading experience.

Thing is, this is the first time in the best part of two years that I’ve really had sufficient amounts of coinciding leisure and wakeful attentiveness to read purely for pleasure.  Previously, these two commodities were pretty much completely separated – wakeful attentiveness was a scarce, desperately-hoarded resource, to be deployed on selfless primary matters like work, close parenting, driving, and any other household tasks too dangerous to address while dead on your feet; leisure, meanwhile, was an even scarcer blurred space in which to slump numbly in front of the PS3 or some HBO boxed sets and wonder whether you’d ever again not feel shattered at the end of a day.  Want to know why there hasn’t been a Read and Rec’d entry for a couple of years?  Now you know.

But I digress.

Coming back to reading was like breaking out of long celibacy.  It was a sensual experience.  I thrummed to the sheer forgotten excitement of getting caught up in (someone else’s) narrative and character again; the sheer Joy of Prose – lyrical sentences, well-honed descriptive phrases, stop-and-think insight – the sheer delight in sharp dialogue, tight observational humour, well-cranked plot tension, elegant deployment of narrative implication.  The greedy physicality of hefting a good book and seeing how much you’ve still got left to enjoy, the sense of possession as you -

Ah.  There’s the rub.

Or there’s where it’s starting to rub, anyway……..

You see, you can’t heft a Kindle – well, you can, but it feels a bit like hefting a pack of those Black and Decker sanding discs; you certainly can’t heft the particular book you’re reading on a Kindle, because that book doesn’t exist for you in any physical form.  And I had to reformat to landscape, holding the Kindle on its side, before I could even approach the sensation of reading an actual book rather than some column article snipped out of a newspaper.  In fact, if I had to summarise the problems I had with Kindling (and, I imagine, e-reading in general), I guess a total lack of physicality would pretty much cover it.  And it turns out – who knew? it certainly took me by surprise – that reading is in many ways an intensely physical pleasure. 

With an e-reader, you have no access to that physicality.  You can’t do that momentary heft-and-measure-by-eye trick to see how much of the book you’ve read, how much you have left.  You can’t leaf through the pages to the end of the chapter you’re on, to see if you should try to finish it or not before you turn in for the night/get out at your tube stop/make some dinner/finish your sandwich and go back to work.  You can’t slap the book shut when it ends, sit back and sigh as that ending sinks in (far from it, in fact – the last page of a Kindle edition novel is invariably followed at once by a quite stunningly intrusive panel asking you to rate this book!! for the Kindle store, and then another page telling you if you liked this book, just check out these others by the same author!!  Uhm, no.  Fuck off.  But again, I digress.)  You can’t flip rapidly back through a Kindle edition book to check on previous narrative detail or – where non-fiction is concerned – previous points or examples given; you certainly can’t shuttle between two or three points in the book to hold a line of argument together in your head when distraction or tiredness has let it slip.  You can’t skim the contents of a chapter as yet unread, skipping rapidly page to page, or go back and skim one you didn’t quite engage with.

You are simply not in possession of anything solid enough for these dynamics to work.

Now, to be fair, the makers of the Kindle are clearly aware of these needs and impulses in the reading population, and they’ve done their level best to provide decent alternatives.  There’s a counter in the bottom right corner of the page, telling you what percentage of the book you’ve got through so far, and a time estimate in the bottom left, built on a clever little algorithm that monitors your reading speed and then works out how many minutes you should take to finish the chapter you’re on…..

But this, all this, is cerebral, people.

It’s a Dungeons and Dragons-style approximation via numbers of the physical experience you aren’t actually having.  It’s not tactile, it’s not instinctive – it’s math.  If I haven’t previously made sure to note (or cannot right now remember) how many pages a Kindle book has in total, the percentage doesn’t actually tell me anything very useful in human terms.  You have read forty two percent of this book – but forty two percent of what?  If I’ve never seen (or touched or hefted) the whole, what use is dividing it up for me into precision segments  There are eight minutes remaining in this chapter.  More useful, I suppose, but again, it feels (and is) calculating.  And, well, we’re not computers, Sebastian, we’re physical.  I don’t want to look at the minute counter, look at my watch and then add up the mathematical exigencies of my situation.  I want to look at the gathered pages between my fingers and make an instinctive human choice (even if it’s the wrong one! and I stay up way too late finishing that chapter – because that too is so very human).  The electronic substitute is a nice try, thanks, guys, but it fails me at some stubborn, visceral level.

Similarly, Kindle offers a neat little search function, where you can type in any word or phrase and blink directly to its location within the text – essentially an electronic index with all the added flexibility you’d expect of any early 21st century personal device.  Added speed, incidentally, not so much; I compared the time it took me to type something into search and blink to the location with the time it took me to look something up in a physical index and then flip to that page and you know what – pretty much the same.  Surprising just how swift and nimble we are with that million year test-bedded combo of fingers, eyes and brain.  No, the chief benefit and advance of Kindle search, as far as I can see, is that it’s unlimited; it allows you to look up items a printed index might not even list; and of course printed fiction doesn’t bother with indexing at all. Cool.  But.

What you can’t do with an e-reader is look up two or three items at the same time (or two or three page references for the same item), hold fingers in the relevant pages and flip casually back and forth.  Nor can you easily flip back and forth around a single searched item and case its context over two or three pages, because it’s impossible to view more than one (rather truncated) Kindle page at the same time, and each time you select to read, you dump out the search function and have to summon it from scratch from the navigation bar.  Sure, the effort to provide useful interface is being made, and with all the electronic and design muscle available, but once again it’s physical continuity that’s gone missing in action here.  Same with page navigation.  Your Kindle will let you go to any page (or – cue painfully seventies-SF sounding terminology – Location) in the book at the touch or two of a screen, and sure, that’s nice – but as any passionate reader will tell you, it’s not especially helpful from a human interface point of view.  Unless you’re making actual academic notes and referencing them by page, your sense of where in the previously read portion of the book something lies is largely tactile and imagistic – Hey, didn’t he say the opposite to this about……yay far back?  Couple of pages into chapter three, right?  The bit where the battle starts.  The page after the page with that wacky graph on it.  So forth.  Your navigation is intrinsically physical.  You estimate and flip back, miss maybe, flip back and forth a bit more and yep, there it is!  

Who, outside of a very diligent student, recalls Hey, he makes this argument from the other side at the bottom of page 237?  Or – come in Alpha Commander 39 – at Location 6471?

Physicality, possession – now I remember.  These are the joys of reading a printed book; you handle it like driving a geared car or cooking on a kick-ass gas range stove (always assuming you like to drive or cook, that is).  The book is a tactile presence in your hands, it has weight and substance, it is yours – yours to discover like buried treasure (in raffish second-hand book exchanges for example, or, pristine and pencil-shaving scented, off the shelves of Waterstones or B&N); yours to have and to hold, to give as a gift (those two trade paperbacks I bought at the airport?  Mother’s Day presents for my wife, albeit sneakily borrowed back after she was done), yours to lend, to peruse, to brood over.  To hold up and smell, when new.  To rack on a shelf and forget when old – and then trace your finger down the spine a couple of years later and take down once more, filled with memory of where and when and who……

So bin the Kindle, right?  Sell it on eBay?

Whoah, not so fast.  Hold your either/or absolutist horses.

Thing is, none of the above actually displaces the very real logistical benefits I mentioned earlier.  The Kindle is a wondrous little machine.  I’ll certainly go on using it when I travel, or when I just have to have a certain book and don’t have easy access to a bookshop that sells it or a rapid Amazon delivery.  Is there reading pleasure to be had from a Kindle edition book?  Absolutely.  You read, you enjoy.  But, for me at least, it remains a circumscribed pleasure compared to the unabridged physicality of reading a printed book.  It’s a concession to other exigencies (like limited luggage space and lack of light and ease of access), a forced compromise.  It’s convenience versus sensuous luxury, a quickie versus a night of passion, a cigarette break versus a weekend away.

E-reading is beef jerky.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like beef jerky rather a lot – it’s strongly flavoured, full of protein, satisfies a deeply-rooted carnivore itch in the hinge of my jaws, and it’s very, very user friendly when you’re traveling.  There’s a great deal of eating pleasure to be derived from munching your way through a bag of the stuff.

But does it compare to a steak dinner by candle-light in a good French restaurant with friends?

Well, you tell me.

Read and Recommended…

Kameron Hurley.

Not that I haven’t read some other stuff too, recently (on which, more as soon as I’m done with Dark Defiles and can grab a decent amount of time to write it down.  Promise.).  But.  Kameron Hurley.

There’s been a lot of talk about some of the first novel shortcomings of God’s War, and some of it perfectly well-founded, but it’s all utterly beside the point.  Kameron Hurley’s writing is the most exciting thing I’ve seen on the genre page since I picked up Peter Watts’ Blindsight five years ago.  It has some of the same characteristics as Watts’ work, too – an eye for the casual brutality of the universe we inhabit, an unrelenting critique of the stupidity and cruelty so common in human behaviour and, twined in with all this, a thin, tightly wound thread of empathy and yearning after something better, something humane, in the face of all that horror.

What Hurley’s writing has (and it’s something not one in a dozen genre practitioners seems able to generate) is passion.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s also a rare freshness to the material, and a heady dash of high octane noir worked into the mix.

I am, as of now, officially an addict.

 

Dublin Up

Second in a very limited series of public appearances I’m making this year – the good people of the National Irish Science Fiction Convention have asked me to be guest of honour at OctoCon 2013.  Details are here.

Somehow, in all those years of literary aspiration and then all these years of literary success, I never managed to get it together to visit Dublin, so this is going to be a joy at a whole number of different levels.  I get to rattle around the city of Yeats, Joyce and Roddy Doyle to name but three; I get to drag my two year old son along to his first SF convention; oh, and I get to hang out, chewing the fat and shooting the shit about genre with like minded souls for a whole weekend.  Ranting too, probably.

Maybe there’ll be a panel about GrimDark……

‘hem.

Anyway – maybe see you there.

Away the Crow Road

We’re pretty remote out here, but news got through all the same.  Quite remarkable how much loss this feels like.

Find some raw spirit on your shelves, or wherever it may be.  Raise a glass.

Iain Banks.  The man is gone, the words remain.

Writer’s Retreat

Under the paper-thin guise of keeping my son’s bilingual heritage topped up, we are back in southern Spain for three months.  Local writing conditions look more or less like this:

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Perhaps as a result, The Dark Defiles is taking shape at a steady one to two thousand words a day, and no weekends off for good behaviour.  Means a lot less time in the pool or the ocean with family but, hey – I suffer for my art, bartender.  More excerpts incoming presently and, if time allows, maybe even a whole new Read and Rec’d list, as promised.  Watch this space.

(Special extra credit will be given for picking up that late eighties soundbite)

The Calm before the Storm

They waited a full day and night for Ringil Eskiath to show.

Everyone was briefed, everyone knew their place.  The locals hid in their homes, the League privateers held ambush positions down at the harbour and all along the edges of the bay.  Lookouts took the high ground at either end, and the watchtower at Dako’s Point.  Certain among the imperial marine prisoners were held in a beer cellar not far from the docks, ready to be hauled out and used for bargaining or simply as shields.  Klithren sat at a table in the Inn on League street, played dice against himself and waited for word.

Ornley held its breath.

The privateers were sanguine – they knew how to sit tight.  It was part of their trade to wait, sifting the haze at the horizon for signs of enemy shipping or a change in the weather, sometimes for days on end, and nothing to break the monotony but the soft rocking of the vessel on the swell.  You learnt patience out there, you had to.  No percentage in getting all riled up ahead of time.  The fight, the storm – these things would be upon you soon enough.  Take the empty hours and breathe them in like pipe-house smoke, they’d be yours for a meagre enough span in the end.

The townspeople were less sanguine.  Maybe if you were a soldier boy you could sit scratching your arse like this all day long, but gouging a living out of the Hironish isles took work.  You were up with the dawn or before, out to sea and casting your nets, or into the surrounding hills to tend your livestock.  There were dry-stone walls to be maintained, crops to be checked for blight, crows and gulls to be kept at bay, eventually the harvest; thatches to be renewed or repaired after storms, peat to be dug and cut and stacked for drying.  Nets to be mended, hulls to be ripped of barnacles, scrubbed and pitched; there was gutting and cleaning, salting, packing, the smokehouse to tend.  Did these bloody blade artists ever stop to think how food ends up on their plates and fire in the grate to keep out the chill?  Thank the Dark Queen we never got that garrison they promised us after the war, if this is all they’re good for……

The hours limped by like aging mules, overladen with expectation, one slow step at a time.  Late into the afternoon, some representation was made to Klithren, that they could not sit like this indefinitely and when did he expect to be done with this Outlaw-Enemy-of-the-League-brought-to-Justice shit?  Because the goats out on Whaler’s Rise wouldn’t milk themselves, you know, and there were-

At which point, Klithren looked up at the little knot of spokesmen, and gave them a thin smile that dried the words in their throats.

He waited a couple of beats and then, when no more complaints looked to be forthcoming, he nodded.  Two privateers stepped in from the corners of the room, and the spokesmen were ushered away, to recriminate bitterly with each other out in the street.

Klithren, for his part, stared after them until the tavern door slammed, then he went back to his dice.  Cup and roll, out onto the scarred wooden table-top with a bony rattle.  Scrutinise the faces the worn cubes offered up.

Scoop and cup, and roll again.

“He’ll come, Venj,” some later claimed they heard him murmur.  “You’ve not long to wait now, mate.”

But whoever he was talking to seemed destined to disappointment.  Afternoon turned into evening, and what miserable grey light there’d been all day went down into dark without any sign of the outlaw or his ship.  The customary lamps were lit along the harbour wall and the wharf-front, the waiting privateers stretched cramped limbs, and cursed, and settled in to wait some more.

“Going to be a long fucking night,” someone grumbled out on the harbour wall and the men down the line all laughed.

“Figure it’ll be worth your while,” someone else called back.  “I was at Rajal beach in the war, I saw Ringil Eskiath fight.  Never seen anything like that, before or since.  We take him down tonight, you’re going to have a tale to get you laid the rest of your natural life.”

More laughter, punctuated this time with lewd commentary.

“Yeah, or you’ll be dog meat,” sneered a grizzled and corpulent privateer sprawled spread-legged with his back to the wall a couple of yards down from the original speaker.  “And your soul sent screaming to hell.”

And he prodded morosely with the tip of his killing knife at the crack between two of the harbour wall flagstones he sat on.  Around him, the laughter damped down a bit.  Stares fell on him, a few of the men shifted out from the wall so they could see him more clearly.

“Say what?”

The grizzled privateer glanced up, saw he had an audience.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said.  “I don’t know nothing about Rajal beach, but before I got this gig, I worked muscle for Slab Findrich back in Trelayne-”

“That slaver piece of shit?”  A younger privateer hawked and spat.

“Too fucking right, that slaver piece of shit.  Findrich pays double the going rate for good men in Etterkal.”

“What’d he pay you, then?”

Jeers.  Further down the line, a sergeant bellowed for quiet.

“Yeah, laugh it up.”  The corpulent privateer glowered and dug harder with his dagger.  The blade tip made a tiny scraping that put your teeth on edge.  “I was in Etterkal when Ringil Eskiath came calling last year, when Findrich put the bounty out him.  I saw what was left of the Sileta brothers when they finally found them.”

The jeers dried up with the mention of the name.  Everyone knew that story, some version or other.  Tavern tale spinners in Trelayne had been drinking off it ever since the news broke.  Mothers down in harbour end used it these days to quieten their unruly infant sons – behave, or Ringil Eskiath’ll come for you in the night and do you like the Sileta brothers.  

The privateer looked round with a thin smile, nodding.

“Slab Findrich threw up when he saw what was done,” he said.  “I was there at his side.  And I’ll tell you this much for free.  Nothing human could have done that.”

“Ah, come off it,”  somebody scoffed.  “What is this Eskiath, a fucking demon now?  You think there aren’t half a hundred whores and losers in harbour end who’d have cut the Siletas up the exact same way if they got the chance.”

“But they weren’t cut up.”  Scrape, scrape went the knife point, along the crack and the listeners’ nerves.  “It wasn’t a blade that did it, it wasn’t that kind of damage.”

Silence.  Lamplight dappled out in thin lines across the black harbour waters.  Out to sea, a barely heard sound that might have been gathering thunder.

Someone cleared their throat.  “Look-”

“He’s just a man,” snapped the privateer who claimed to have been at Rajal beach.  “Fast with a blade and not afraid to die is all.  Seen it before plenty of times.”

The corpulent storyteller scowled.  “That’s what you think.  Maybe he was still a man back at Rajal, but no man could have-”

“You!”  The sergeant, grown tired of the raised voices, had stirred himself and come stalking down the line.  “Yeah, you – fatty.  Shut the fuck up, before I kick your larded arse down in the cellar with the prisoners.”

The rest of the privateers broke up – ripples of snorting laughter along the harbour wall.  The sergeant rounded on them.

“That goes for anyone else around here who thinks this is all a big fucking joke.  You stow that shit, right now.  Call yourselves men of war?  You’re on watch, all of you – not down the tavern with your pox-ridden sisters on your arm.”

The laughter died abruptly.  The sergeant glared up and down the line, spaced his words for impact.

“When this outlaw faggot piece of shit comes creeping into harbour tonight, I want men on this wall, not a gaggle of fucking fishwives.  Do I make myself clear?”

It seemed, from the ensuing quiet, that he did.

Still, he stood a while longer, daring anyone to catch his eye.  When no-one looked like taking up the challenge, he evidently judged his point made and headed back to his post.  Muttering snaked in his wake, but it was muted, and there was no more conversation along the harbour wall for quite a while.

The privateers settled once more to waiting.

But the only thing that came creeping into harbour as the night wore on was a thick, low-lying sea fog that blanketed vision, muffled sound and chilled them all to the bone.

 

*

 

“I know you can’t see to steer in it,” said Ringil patiently.  “You don’t need to steer in it.  The ship will steer itself.”

Not really accurate, but about as close to the truth as he wanted to get.  If he’d told captain and crew what was really going to steer Dragon’s Demise through the fog, Gil suspected he’d have an all-out mutiny on his hands.

This swordsman-sorcerer gig was turning out harder to balance than you’d expect.

Lal Nyanar, for instance.  There he stood on the helm deck, fine aristo features pinched up in a frown, shaking his head.  Torches bracketed at the rail gave a flickering yellow light, enough to make out the salients.  Below them on the main deck, the mist roiled and crept like something alive. Above and ahead of them it wrapped tendril fingers through the rigging and around the masts.

“This….”  Nyanar gestured weakly.  “This is no natural fog.”

Ringil held onto his temper.  “Of course it’s not natural – you saw me summon it, didn’t you? Now can we please get underway while it lasts.”

“You put all our souls in danger with this northern witchery, Eskiath.”

“Oh, please.”

“I think,” said Senger Hald dryly, “That my lord Ringil is most concerned at the moment with our temporal well-being.  To which I must concur.  There will be time enough to worry about the salvation of our immortal souls once we’ve saved our mortal skins.”

Ringil masked his surprise.  “Thank you, commander.  I do believe you’ve stated the case admirably there.  Captain?”

Nyanar looked betrayed.  Hald was probably the closest thing to a soul-mate he had on the expedition.  Both men had washed up in the company through sheer chance.  Both had been witness to the arrival of the Helmsman Anasharal whilst they were about entirely routine duties, and so in the interests of keeping the secrets of the quest between as few as possible, both had been promptly seconded to the command.

But more than that, they were both of a kind.  Both were Yhelteth born and bred, both came of noble stock – Hald might lack the staggering wealth of the Nyanar clan in his own family backdrop, but like most home-grown military commanders in the Empire, his lineage would be impeccable – and both had contented themselves with moderate careers in soldiering that kept them close to home.  Neither man had seen more than superficial deployment during the war.  Neither man had previously been outside the Empire’s borders.

Now here they were, up on the mist-ridden outer rim of the world, the sun-baked certainties of Yhelteth three thousand miles astern, and suddenly Hald was breaking ranks.  Buying into this infidel sorcery and the dark northern powers it called on.  Casting off the sober tenets of the Revelation and trusting to an unholy alien faith.  Worse still, they had no Citadel-assigned invigilator along to weigh in – Jhiral moved swiftly enough to crush that custom as soon as events at Afa-marag gave him the upper hand.  The palace, he declared, could not possibly trouble the Mastery for valued officers of the faith when they must surely be needed here at home to help with the purges; the northern expedition must perforce rely on the individual piety and moral strength of its members without recourse to clerical support; as, in fact, must all naval and military commands, for the time being at least, until this deeply shocking crisis has passed.  No, really, such an outpouring of pastoral concern is touching, but his Imperial Radiance insists.

No invigilators, no clear moral compass, no working chain of command, and the only viable father figure around wears a scar on his face and has demons at his back.

You had to feel sorry for Nyanar, caught up in it all through no fault of his own.

No, you have to kick his arse and get him moving.

“Captain?  Are we agreed?”

Nyanar looked from Ringil to Hald and back, mouth pursed tight as if he’d just been served a platter of peasant gruel.  He turned his back and stared out into the fog.

“Very well,” he snapped.  “Sanat, raise anchor, make sail.  Inshore rig.”

“Aye sir.”  Sanat sent a practised first mate’s call rolling down the length of the ship.  “Raise anchor!  Make sail!”

The call picked up, was echoed across the decks.  Men moved in the rigging, vaguely seen, and canvas came tumbling down.  Inshore rig, taken as read.  Grunted cadences from the prow and the repeated graunch of wet rope on wood as the anchor came up.

  Dragon’s Demise shifted and slid on the swell.  Began to move with purpose.

Ringil felt himself relax a little with the motion.  He thought it had been touch and go for a while back there.  Not for the first time, he wondered if the powers he was acquiring under Hjel’s tutelage were really worth the trouble spent getting them.

What point, after all, in racking yourself to produce a handy sorcerous mist, if the men you led wouldn’t follow you into it?

 

*

 

They’d watched him raise hands to the sky and contort his face, like some barking mad market square prophet of doom.  A knot of sailors not otherwise occupied gathered on the main deck below to stare.  They’d heard the muttering sounds he made deep in his throat, seen the splay-fingered traceries he cast across the air.  He supposed they must have done some muttering themselves, some more clutching at their precious talismans, but he’d been too lost in it by then to notice.  Too busy pouring his entire focus into the glyphs he made, because in the end that was the only way it would work.

You must write upon the air like a scribe, Hjel tells him on a cold stony beach somewhere at the margins of the Grey Places.  The air itself is parchment, read continually by powers waiting for command.  But such powers can only read what is written clearly, can only answer commands clearly expressed.  Cast poorly and you are no better than a clumsy scribe, blotching or scrawling your script.  Cast poorly or in error, and there will be no answer.

  Now try again. 

  It takes days.

It takes morning after bleak early morning, going down to the shore again and again from the cold, coarse-grassed dunes where Hjel’s gypsy band are camped; it takes day after day of standing there facing the ocean like an enemy, clawing at the air, grating the learnt strings of polysyllables until his throat is raw.  It takes days, and not even Hjel’s caresses under canvas at night can take away the impatient frustration it stirs in him.

But finally, one morning, he goes down to the shore in an odd, empty mood, alone – Hjel turns over under the blankets when he rises, mumbles something, does not open his eyes – and he stands there, and he casts, and this time he does it right.

The mist rolls in from the sea, blots out everything around him.

Wraps him in its damp embrace.

Now, aboard Dragon’s Demise, it came as second nature.  His throat had long since accustomed itself to the harsh sounds he needed to make, his fingers had grown supple with practice.  And whatever elemental powers lurked in the coves and straits of the Hironish, now they leapt to do his bidding.  He sensed them – rising off the darkened ocean’s surface like cold steam, pouring down out of gullies and caves in the ancient cliffs along this coast, circling the anchored vessel in fitful band-light like curious wolves, darting in now and then to stalk the decks unseen by human eyes, to ruffle the flames of a torch, or brush past crew members with wild, unhuman hilarity, leaving the brief touch of chilly tendril fingers and shivers on the spine.

He felt them gather on the helm deck at his back.

He felt them breathing down his neck.

He gathered their cold breath to him like a cloak, he breathed it in.  He smiled as the ikinri ‘ska came on like some icy battlefield drug.

He heard, as if in a dream, the lookout overhead, calling out the fog as it rolled in and wrapped them.

The ikinri ‘ska syllables died away in his throat, scuttling back down under cover, their work done.  The muscles in his cheeks and jaw eased out of their cramping grimace and his arms sagged to his sides.  His aching fingers hung loose, his eyes – he wasn’t aware he’d closed them – snapped suddenly open, and he found himself staring into Senger Hald’s face.

The marine commander shuddered visibly in the torchlight.

Turned away.

 

*

 

  Dragon’s Demise made curiously good time down the coast, as if the same elemental forces that had brought the fog now clung to the masts and filled the cautiously-rigged canvas with their breath.  As if they were anxious to see the ship arrive.  Once or twice, the helmsman remarked that it felt as if something was dragging on the hull.  But they were a prudent distance out from the shore in five fathoms or more of water, and when Nyanar glanced askance at Ringil, the Trelayne knight just shrugged.

Now and then, off the port bow, they heard the rumbling prowl of a storm.  But it was faint and distant to the east, and showed no signs of coming for them.

These are not trivial sorceries, Hjel warns him, when he has the magic down.  The elementals are capricious, and their range is wide.  Unleash them, and their mischief will be general.  Try not to worry about it too much, it’s a price you have no choice but to pay.  That they do your will in your vicinity is the trick.  What havoc they wreak elsewhere need not be your concern. 

Ringil shrugs.  Sounds no worse than most men I’ve commanded. 

He stood alert throughout the night, though, listening intently to the storm and ready to pull down the ikinri ‘ska on the elementals’ heads if they showed signs of getting cute.

The fog held.  The storm stayed away.

They made Ornley harbour with the dawn.

 

Raise a Glass

In the summer of 1987, a freshly minted graduate, I was down in London paying off student debt – a mercifully lightweight business back in those halcyon days of free university education and even maintenance grants for those who’d committed the grave neo-liberal sin of being born to parents of limited means.  That said, money was still tight – like a lot of aspiring writers, I’d not thought to gird myself with any kind of back-up career option and so was working the usual variegated series of jobs you see in so many author bios.  I was mostly broke as result, but still managing to have a pretty good time.  You know how it is.  After the comfort and confines of university, suddenly the whole rough world was out there for the tasting and I seemed to have an infinite amount of time to work through the menu.  I’d barely even scratched the surface of my twenties, everything was ahead of me.  Somehow, being broke didn’t put much of a dent in the wonder of it all.

It did, however, put a dent in my expenditure on books.  I didn’t get to buy them very often, and I never bought them new.  That wasn’t as crushing a blow as it might seem.  Charing Cross Road was full of musty second-hand bookshops back then, and I only lived a half hour walk away.  Didn’t even need to take the tube.

Then one day, I found myself making an exception to my vow of second-hand bookishness.  It was a novel I found in one of those grubby-glass-fronted independent bookshops still existing back then along the Tottenham Court road.  It had a curious, Soviet-realist derived front cover, a tumble of broadsheet accolades on the back and it lacked any kind of useful blurb.  I had no idea what it was actually about, so I opened it up and started to read.  About five minutes and a half dozen pages later, I carefully shuffled through the contents of my wallet, separated out the three pound notes (remember them?) that I needed and in an ecstasy of consumer guilt I paid for Iain Banks’ The Bridge, marched back to my (shared) room at UCL Halls of Residence, and read the book cover to cover that same afternoon.

I’d never read anything like it. It blew me away.

I sometimes think I’ve never read anything like it since.

Later that week, I lent The Bridge to my room-mate – read this, it’s fucking brilliant!! – went out and broke my vow again.  I bought everything this Banks guy had ever written.  Fortunately for my finances, that turned out to be only two other novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking On Glass.  They set me back another hard earned four pounds fifty, but when I paid this time I was clear-headed about what I was doing.  Whatever this guy wrote, I would read, as soon as I could lay my hands on it. Some luxuries are worth the sacrifice.  When Espedair Street came out, I got it in hardback.

Twenty five years later, I still own those books, the very same copies, and Iain Banks is dying.

It’s hard to communicate how that feels.  I only ever met Iain once, extremely briefly, and we barely exchanged hellos.  I don’t know him in any real sense.  But in just as real a sense, he’s been a constant companion throughout the last twenty five years.  Reading his books marked a lot of the major stages of my life.  I pre-ordered them at the British Council library when I worked my first ESL job in Ankara.  I evangelised about them to colleagues who, years away from the UK, had never heard of the man.  Back in London during the early nineties, I brandished them at friends and lovers as a powerfully human alternative to the smugly cold and clinical early fiction of Ian McEwan (Banks could go head to head with McEwan for atrocity and horror, but somehow an irrepressible humane and human warmth always soaked through the prose).   I lent them to my wife when we first met, with much the same words as I’d used to my room-mate seven years previously.  Her English wasn’t that great back then, and yet nineteen years on she still remembers The Wasp Factory and The Bridge as if she’d read them a couple of weeks ago.  Talking incessantly about them (along with Reservoir Dogs and the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge) was a significant supporting beam in the structure of our early relationship.  The way our feelings chimed over those books was an early indicator that, this time around, we might be playing for keeps.

Then there’s the direct literary influence – Banks was an early weapon for me in my secession from the po-faced literary establishment.  He was a bloody great broadsword of kinetic fictional prowess, pointing the way you could go if you weren’t up for this gnawing, angst-ridden navel-gazing the English literary scene seemed so wedded to at the time.  His books were about stuff, in a way that so much other so-called literary fiction of the period wasn’t.  Shit happened in them – violent, exciting, often silly, hilarious, fantastical shit.  Just as you could see the man’s human warmth underlying the prose, so you could detect a delight in fireworks on the page and daft jokes for their own sake.  No-one was less surprised than me to discover that the man was also writing outrageously sardonic wide-screen space opera.  I can still recall the smile that came to my lips when, reading Consider Phlebas on a plane back to a job in Istanbul, I first stumbled on the deadpan names of the Culture’s starcraft and what they implied about the Culture as a whole.  Later, I became a fully paid up devotee of the sardonic wit and black humour of those Minds, drones and other assorted dream machines.  Later still, that same sardonic black humour would creep in and tinge my own writing to no small extent.

Lastly, there’s the man himself.  As I said, I don’t know Iain in any real sense, but in all the conversations I’ve had with people who do, I have quite literally never heard anyone say a bad word about him.  Every single commentary has been either admiring or complimentary or both.  That’s no mean achievement in any walk of life, and in the nervy, gossipy world of authors, aspiring and published and their critics, it’s almost beyond belief.  I can’t think of a single other writer – a single other person, really – about whom I could say the same thing.  To rub so many people so thoroughly up the right way, you really do have to be a remarkably decent human being.

And then you read that personal statement linked to above, the die-hard gallows humour and utter lack of self-pity, and you realise that to remarkably decent you must also add unassumingly courageous and colossally strong.  And then you start to see where all those dynamic, powerful and ultimately humane fictional visions were drawn from over the years

We are not just going to lose a great writer this year, we are going to lose a great heart.  I only hope I have half the same heart and humour when my turn comes around.

So raise a glass, wherever you are, whoever you are.  To Iain Banks, the writer, the man.  Iain – I never knew you, and that was my loss.  But your writing etched the backdrop of the life I’ve lived so far, and you remain an example to the end.  All best wishes for all the time you have left.

Grim, Dark and Straw

So it seems I’m writing GRIMDARK!!!

Who knew?

Well, certainly not me.  There I was thinking, I’d just transferred my whole future noir schtick over the fence from SF into a fantasy landscape – a bundle of goods that Colin Greenland once nailed (rather eloquently, I thought) in this review of Broken Angels here as the pulse, the urgency, of pulp: its preoccupation with the overwhelming odds against truth and justice; its climate of loss and death. 

But over here in fantasyland, it seems there’s a posse or two going round who don’t hold with that sort of thing.  Overwhelming odds against Truth and Justice?  A climate of Loss and Death?  Listen here, mister, this is a nice town, full of nice folks who don’t want no trouble.  We don’t got none of that trash-talking GrimDark filth around here, and we don’t need none neither.

Really?  Are you sure?  I mean, it’s just, I see Red Joe Abercrombie’s horse tied up over there at the rail.   He seems to have a bed for the night.  And, well, couldn’t help noticing the old Game of Thrones saloon as I rode in, all lit up fit for a celebration.  That’s Georgie Martin’s place, isn’t it?  Seems awful busy…..

You’re not hearing me boy.  I said – we don’t got nothing for your sort around here.  We don’t got no GrimDark, we don’t want none neither.

O-kay, boys.  I get the picture.  But could you at least, you know, tell me what GrimDark actually is – so I don’t go and trouble these fine people with it, without meaning to.

You trynna be funny, boy?

Uh – no.  I’m just, uh, curious, you know.  As to what exactly GrimDark would, uhm, be.  Exactly.

(a sudden silence.  the half-wit with the shotgun quivers with righteous indignation)

Go on, Missy  Aitch – whyn’t you tell him, tell him good.

You shut your mouth, Damien, we don’t need to explicate ourselves to the likes of him.  We don’t need-

I’ll tell him, then, if n you won’t.  See here, mister, it’s like this, it’s all blood and gore and bein’ mean to womenfolk n all, and it’s dark too, just no hope anywhere, that’s what, no good men or heroes or anything nice at all, nobody smiling or happy or bakin’ a apple pie or nothing like that-

No, you fool, it ain’t got nothin’ to do with pies-

Leo says-

I don’t care what Leo says, THAT AIN’T IT!

(a second silence)

Uhm – are you ladies and gentlemen acquainted with a Mr McCarthy at all, from the Territories?  He would have been through here a couple of times, I reckon, and that you’ve just described is -

You done been told once already, boy – don’t you git no smart mouth on you.  We don’t mess with them from the Territories, that ain’t none of our concern what they do up there.  This here is a nice town for nice folk, and we-

Like apple pie.  Yeah, I think I got that bit.

It ain’t got NOTHIN’ to do with PIE! I already done SAID that!

Al-right, then.  Nothing to do with pie.  Fair enough.  Take it easy there, put the rope down.  But can you tell me what it does have to do with?  Exactly.

It’s-

(silence)

Anything, anything at all that-

(more silence)

And who’s doing it?  Exactly?

(then, everyone together in a rush)

Bein’ mean to women folk-

All that there gore and blood-

Right.  Too many swords and battles and-

No, no, we LIKE that.

You like that?  Ehm.  But you said-

Too much BLOOD!  You touched in the head, boy, or you just deaf?  Not too much swords, not too much axes.  Too much BLOOD!

O-kay.  So good with the swords and axes, but no blood.  And no being mean.

No bein’ mean to WOMENFOLK!

Right.  But being mean to menfolk – that’d……..be okay, would it?

Well (some shuffling)  Not TOO mean, no.  Just……..normal kinda mean.  Just regular kind, unnerstan?

Not really.  Uhm, look-

No, YOU look, mister.  This is a nice town, with nice folk in it, and we don’t aim to have no GrimDark around here.  We don’t need to explicate ourselves to the likes of you, we know GrimDark when we seen it, and it is a SIN.  Now that’s good enough for us, and it goddamn well better be good enough for you if you plan on stayin’ in this town.

Damn straight!

O-kay.  Yeah.

(pause)

So probably best you be movin’ on, alright? 

Uhm, no.  Look, gentlemen, ladies, here’s what I’m going to do for now.  I’m going across to the saloon there and buy Red Joe a drink I owe him from way back.  Now if you would be so good as to select one or two of the more, ehm, intellectually coherent among your number, and send them over with some clear explanation of what you mean by this GrimDark, who’s committing it, whether here or out in the Territory, and on what evidence you’d base that claim,  well, then I guess we could all sit down with the marshal and talk about it like civilised citizens.  How’d that be?

Take your time.  Gonna be right here, waiting.

 

 

Imperialism Redux, Cut-Off and Sunday Morning Coming Down

For those who were asking, PicoCon now have a payment portal up for those wanting to buy tickets – it’s live on the Con website here.

You’ll see from the timetable they’ve posted that I’m giving my Guest of Honour address on Sunday morning at 10.30 – something which doesn’t scare me as much as it once would have.  In fact, it doesn’t scare me at all, Baldrick. Twenty months of fatherhood have made me into an entirely tougher, more functional person in the hours before noon.  These days I laugh in the face of six am wake-ups, and tweak the nose of the dreaded breakfast by pre-dawn light.  By 10.30 I’ll have been awake for hours.  So have no fear, bring your hangovers and your come-downs along, and I promise not to talk too violently or make any loud bangs.

See you there!

postscript on the Great January Signing Sale – there are still a few orders coming in, still a few spare copies kicking around, so I’m going to keep channels open for another couple of weeks.  But after that, I’m really going to have to wrap up – not least so I can put remaining stock back on my shelves and vacuum the office floor.  So if you’ve stumbled in late, or are suddenly the recipient of an unexpected tax refund and don’t know what to do with your newfound wealth, then jump right in.  The hard cut-off date is Friday Feb 16th, just before I head out to Imperial.  Any requests I receive on or before that Friday will be fulfilled, anything after will……….fall…………into……….the………….void……..

………

…….

…splish!