Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 9

Workspace Wanted

So there’s this…….

That’s my office floor you’re looking at, and as you can see, things are getting a bit out of hand.

Of course, it doesn’t help that areas previously designated for storage of my personal shit have now been annexed for storage of personal shit belonging to my son instead – and as anyone with a toddler will know, small children own a quite inordinate amount of shit relative to their size.

All of which means that for a limited period only  - The Great January Signing Sale is Now On!

Well, I did say, last time this happened, back in 2009, that I’d have another sale someday – it’s just I naively estimated that I’d need about seven years before I built up the required levels of stock again.  Turns out it took barely four.  So here we go again, procedure as before:

I’ll sign and/or personalise to e-mail order as requested, and then sell you the resulting copy for cover price plus postage – with the exception of the very beautiful Subterranean Press limited editions of The Steel Remains and The Cold Commands, which will go for a flat $100 a copy plus postage (Sub’s cover price for these is $75, but I don’t want to undercut such a small-scale quality-driven operation.  Your extra 25 bucks buys you a personalisation on top of the existing signature that all Subterranean editions carry as standard).

If that seems fair, all you need to participate are:

1) A pay-pal account

2) A home address

3) Some money

To save time and math, I’m going to band all postage costs at a couple of basic levels – Big (hardback, trade paperback) and Small (mass market paperback). This will obviously vary with destination.

So – mail me with what you want, I’ll let you know if I’ve got copies, and I’ll give you a price. If you’re agreeable to that price, you make the payment into the pay-pal account I give you, and I’ll send the book off as soon as confirmation comes through.

For now, you can assume that I have multiple copies of UK and US editions, both paperback and hardback, back as far as Woken Furies – spares of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Market Forces, unfortunately, are all already gone.  I’ve also got foreign language editions of pretty much everything I’ve written, translated into everything from Finnish to Korean (some of whose covers are very cool indeed), and a small selection of audiobooks (which I’ll sign and/or personalise in marker on the back of the case).  Ask for specifics, and ye shall receive.  Additionally, for gaming and/or comic enthusiasts, I have a sheaf of the original individual edition Crysis comics from IDW, numbers 2 through 5 (stock of 1 and 6 is already exhausted, I’m afraid).

As I say, this is for a limited time only, specifically for the purposes of clearing some space, and I expect (I hope!) supply will decline quite fast – so if you’re interested, for either yourself or a gift for someone else, I’d advise you to get in quick!

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

The house Tand’s men took her to was on the upper fringes of the town, just before Ornley thinned out into a scattering of isolated crofts.  It was high ground, and there would have been a great view back down the slope of the bay to the harbour, if the air below hadn’t been quite so clogged with drifts of murky, low-lying cloud.

  At least we’re out of the rain.

It was something Tand appeared to take comfort from as well.  He put back the hood on his cloak as they walked the last couple of turns in the street, looked approvingly up at the sky.  He was doing his best not to look smug.

“Seems to be clearing,” he said.

She tried not to sound too bad-tempered.   “You really think we can trust this confession, Tand?”

“Oh, most certainly.  Nalmur’s a good man, one of my best.  He knows his work.”

Nalmur was leading the group.  He glanced back at the mention of his name.

“I’d stake my life on it, my lady.  We got at least three other squealers leading us to this bloke by name, and when he talked, well – you know it when a man cracks, you can almost hear it happen. Like a rotten tree branch going, it is.”

She masked a desire to bury one of her knives in his throat.  “Right.  And have you left this cracked man in any fit state to talk to us?”

“Oh, yes, my lady.  Didn’t need to rough him up much past the usual.”  An opened palm, explanatory.  “He’s a family man, see.  Good lady wife, a pair of strapping young sons.  Plenty to work with.”

She saw smirks creep out on the faces of the other men in the group.

“Yes, thank you Nalmur.”  Perhaps Tand saw something in her face.  “You can spare us the details, I think.”

“Just as you like, my lord.  My lady.  But that confession is rock solid.  You could build a castle on it, sir.”

Tand tipped her a told-you-so look.  She worked at not grinding her teeth.

They took the final turn in the street, found themselves facing a short row of cottages, dwellings more hunched and huddled than the buildings lower down the hill.  A brace of Tand’s men were loitering outside an opened door about halfway along the row.  They were guffawing about something, but when they saw the approaching party, they stiffened into quiet and an approximation of drilled military attention.

A curtain twitched in her peripheral vision.  She didn’t bother to look round.  You could feel the eyes on you all the way along the street.  Gathered at the edges of the darkened windows and in the gap of doors cracked a bare inch open, waiting to slam.  Watching, hating as the booted feet tramped by.

It was the post-war occupations all over again.

  Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands – we come to you in peace and the universal brotherhood of the Holy Revelation.

  But if you don’t want those things, then we’re going to fuck you up.

Tand had taken the lead.  He nodded at his saluting men and stepped between them, ducking in under the low lintel.  Archeth followed, into the soft glow of a banked fire in the grate, and candles lit against the day’s end gloom.  There was a pervasive smell of damp from the earthen floor and the whiff of voided bowels to go with it.  A sustained, hopeless keening leaked in from the next room.  Three more of Tand’s mercenaries stood guard over a man stripped to the waist and strapped to an upright chair.

Nalmur and the rest of the squad crowded in after her.

“Well then,” said Tand.  “Nalmur, will you do the honours?”

Nalmur took a theatrical turn around the chair and its occupant.  As Archeth’s eyes adjusted to the light, she made out bruising on the man’s face, crusted blood from the broken nose, a series of livid burn marks across chest and upper arms.  His breeches were soaked through at the crotch.  Nalmur dropped a friendly arm around his shoulders, and the man flinched violently against his bonds.

“My lord, my lady – meet Critlin Tilgeth, first warden of the Aldrain flame, Hironish chapter.  Master Critlin here likes to get together with his pals a couple of times a year in a stone circle just west of here and invoke the spirits of the Vanishing Folk.  Which they do by dancing around naked and fucking each other’s wives senseless.  I guess you got to find something to fill your evenings with up here.”

Belly laughs from the men around her.

“Get on with it,” she said harshly.

“Yes, my lady.”  Nalmur slapped the tied man amiably on one cheek.  Straightened up.  He switched to accented but serviceable Naomic.   “Tell us about the grave again, Critlin.  Tell us what you did.”

“Yes.  Yes, we dug-”  Critlin swallowed hard.  His voice sounded as broken as his face.  Low and shaky, a pleading in it, like raindrops trembling on the underside of a roof’s edge.  His eyes kept darting to the doorway into the other room, the source of the endless weeping.   “We dug it up.  We – we went at night.  The day before Quickening Eve, when the waters are low.”

Archeth frowned.  “What waters?”

“He means the gap at Grey Gull peninsula, my lady.” Nalmur, for all the world like a tutor helping out a feeble student under examination.  “Says the currents bring more water in at certain times, make it harder to cross.”

“But-”  She shook her head irritably.  “There was a dead sheep in that grave, that’s all we found, we didn’t….”

They’d been using Tethanne, while Critlin gaped uncomprehendingly back and forth, between this evil-eyed black woman and his tormentor-in-chief.  Archeth made an effort, shunted the constant keening to the back of her mind, summoned her own creaky Naomic.

“You uh – you took the Illwrack Changeling out – and put a, uhm – deformed?  Yeah – a deformed sheep in his place?  What – position? – no, wait, what condition – what condition was the body in?”

Critlin hesitated.  He seemed puzzled by the question, maybe confused by her fumbling, error-strewn speech.  Nalmur fetched him a massive clout across the side of the head.

“The lady Archeth asks you a question!  Answer, and be quick about it!  Or perhaps you think little Eril’s jealous of the caresses his big brother’s had from my men.  Perhaps he’d like some of the same?”

The wailing from the next room re-doubled.  Critlin moaned deep in his chest and strained against his bonds.  Nalmur grinned and raised his hand again.

“That’s enough!”  Archeth snapped.

The hand came down.  A small, angry smile played around the corners of Nalmur’s mouth for a moment, but he bowed his head.  Archeth leaned in closer to Critlin.  He shrank from her, as far as the chair-back would allow.  The stench of shit wafted as he moved.  She raised her hands, palms outward, backed away again.

“Just tell me,” she said quietly.  “Was the body intact?  Had it decayed at all?”

“Intact,” blurted Critlin.  “It was intact!  The sheep was but recently slaughtered.  We took it from Gelher’s flock and-”

“Alright, that’s it you little goat-fucker!”  Nalmur, stepping in with fist clenched and swinging.  Archeth swung up and round, put a knife-fighter’s block in the way.

“I said that’s enough.”

Nalmur recoiled from touching her, whether out of respect for rank or superstitious dread, it was hard to tell.  But there was a tight anger in his face.

“My lady, he is taking the piss.  He’s-”

  “He is broken!”  Her yell froze the room.  One of Nalmur’s men, already on his zealous way to the other room, stopped dead his tracks.  Archeth swung on him, pointed.  “You!  You step through that door, I will fucking kill you.”

Tand stirred.  “My lady, the man shows a distinct lack of respect, given his station.  Joking at our expense should hardly go unpunished.”

“I will kill you.”  Still eye-balling Nalmur’s man.  “Don’t test me, human.”

And abruptly it was there in her head, like some unfolding map of a battle campaign she’d only heard rumour of until now.  How it could be done, how it would go.  The rest of Tand’s men, their positions in the room, the gnarled hilt of each knife she carried, how to reach them, in what sequence, how many spilt-blood seconds it would take to fucking kill them all…..

  These fucking humans, Archidi.  Grashgal’s voice, almost toneless, empty of anything but the distant trickle of despair, as the Kiriath laid their plans to leave.  They’re going turn us into something we never used to be.

Hadn’t he called it right?

Didn’t she feel it herself, day-in day-out, the corrosive rub of human brutality, human cruelty, human stupidity against the weave of her soul.  The slow erosion of her own moral certainties, the ground she gave up with every political compromise, every carefully balanced step in the Great Kiriath Mission, every lie she told herself about necessary sacrifice in the name of building something better…..

Through the doorway, the constant keening.  Her hands itched for the hilts of her knives.

Maybe it was just fucking time.

Menith Tand was watching her, fascinated.  She felt his gaze like shadow in the corner of one eye, and something about it, about being observed, pulled her back from the brink.

“You want to live, you stand down,” she told the mercenary by the door.  Voice flat now, as flat and emptied out as Grashgal’s had ever been.  “Nalmur, get your men out of here.”

Nalmur looked at Tand, outraged.   The slave magnate nodded soberly.

“But my lord, this man is-”

“Broken.  Remember?” Archeth fixed her eyes on Critlin as she spoke, didn’t look round, didn’t look at Nalmur at all.  She didn’t trust herself to.  “You heard him break, you said  Like a rotten tree branch.  Couldn’t miss it.  Your work here is done, sellsword.  Now get out, and take your thugs with you.”

It took less than a minute to clear the house.  Give Nalmur his due, he ran a tight enough crew.  A sharp whistle brought a couple of younger mercenaries out of the room the keening was coming from.  A gruff command and everybody trooped out, leaving Archeth and Tand alone with Critlin.  Nalmur was last man out, slamming the door ungraciously shut.

The room seemed suddenly larger, less oppressive.  Even the weeping next door seemed to ebb a little.

Archeth crouched in front of Critlin’s chair, made herself as unthreatening as she knew how.  The Naomic came a little easier this time around.  Just getting Tand’s men out of the house felt like a headache lifting.

“Listen to me, Critlin.  Just listen.  No-one’s going to hurt you anymore.  You have my word.  No-one’s going to hurt your family, no-one’s going to hurt you.  Just tell me again about the body.”

“The……the sheep?”

She drew a deep breath, staved off a krin-driven impulse to grab Critlin and start slapping him.  “No, not the sheep.  The body in the grave.  What state was the body in the grave in?”

“But…..”  Critlin stared.  His voice quavered.  “There was no body in the grave.”

Archeth shot a glance at Tand.

“Look,” the slave magnate began angrily.  “You told my men-”

Critlin cringed as if Nalmur had just come back through the door.

“There was bone,” he gabbled.  “Just bone, just fragments of it, tiny, nothing left but that.  The rest was just….rotted…..”

His voice petered out.  He was staring at them both as if they were insane.  Archeth groped for some context.

“Well – were you surprised by that?”

He looked back at her numbly.

“Surprised?”

“That the Illwrack Changeling’s body had rotted?  Did that surprise you?”

“N-no, my lady.  He has been dead these four thousand years.”

“Yeah, but-”

She shut her mouth with a snap.  Recognised suddenly which side of reasonable they’d all somehow ended up.

  Because if these last weeks have been anything at all, Archidi, it’s a lesson in how badly myth and legend butt up against the real world.

And yet here she still was, wanting to know why a body put in the ground four millenia ago wouldn’t be in decent condition when you dug it up.

  This place is driving us all insane.

“Alright, so there was no body.”  Tand seemed to have moved past his previous anger – there was a  deadly metronome patience in his voice now.  “Or at least nothing much left of one.  And you expected that.  So why bother digging up the grave in the first place?”

“The lodge elder ordered it, my lord.”  Critlin’s head sagged forward.  He seemed to be giving up some final thing.  “To take the sword.”

Archeth gave Tand another significant look.  “There’s a sword now?”

The slave magnate shrugged.  “He was a warrior, was he not, this Illwrack Changeling?  Makes sense that they’d bury him with his weapons.”

“Alright, so you took the sword.”  Archeth rubbed at her closed eyes with finger and thumb.  “But, look – why bury a fucking sheep in its place?  Why would you do that?”

“The lodge-master ordered that too, my lady.”  The words were falling out of Critlin’s mouth now, stumbling to get out.  He was done, he was over some kind of hill, and his eyes flickered more and more to the door into the other room.  “Gelher’s flock have the run of Grey Gull – several were born last season with deformities – the lodge-master said it was a sign, that the soul of the Changeling had awakened – most died at birth, but two or three survived until this year.  So the lodge-master said we must sacrifice one such in thanks – lay it in place of the sword.  We did only as he ordered us, as our oath demanded.”

Archeth drew Quarterless from the sheath in the small of her back.  The knife blade glimmered in the low light.

“Where is the sword now?”

“Taken back, my lady.”  His eyes were fixed dully on the blade.  For one chilly moment, Archeth thought she saw a longing in that gaze that made no distinction between Quarterless cutting his bonds or his throat.  “Back to Trelayne.  There will be a ceremony.  The lodge-master says rejoice, the Aldrain are returning.”

She shivered, not sure if it was his words or the look in his eyes that caused it.  She shook it off, knelt at his side and sliced through the cords binding his legs to the chair.  He began to weep, like a small child.  The stench from where he’d pissed and shat himself was stronger this close in.  She cut the cords off his chest and arms, ripped them loose with unneedful violence.  She stood back, let the sliced leavings of cord dribble out of her hands onto the floor.

She swallowed hard.

“Go to your family,” she said.  “You will not be harmed further.  You have my word.”

Critlin staggered upright, clutching at one arm.  He limped away into the other room.  Archeth stared after him, locked up in a paroxysm of something she could not name.

Menith Tand cleared his throat.  “Perhaps, my lady-”

“Give me your purse,” she said distantly.

“I beg your pardon?”

She stirred as if awakening.  Turned on him, Quarterless still in her hand.  Words like hammered nails into wood.  “Give me your mother fucking purse!”

Tand’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly.  The same chained rage she’d seen in his eyes at the inn was there again. But he reached carefully beneath his cloak and fished out an amply swollen soft black leather purse.  Weighed it gently in the palm of his hand.

“I do not care for your tone, my lady.”

“Yeah?”  She reached back and put Quarterless away in its sheath.  Safer there, the way she felt right now.  “Then take it up with the Emperor when we get back.  I’m sure you’ll be able to buy yourself an audience.”

“Yes, no doubt.  Using the same funds that have made me a significant sponsor of this expedition and-”

She chopped him down.  “Of which I am nominated imperial commander.  Are you going to give me that purse or am I going to take it from you?”

Brief stillness between them.  The faint reek of shit from the stained torture chair she stood beside.  Horseplay commotion from Tand’s men out in the street.  Raised voices – they seemed to be squabbling about something.  In the next room, the keening went on as if Critlin had never been released.

Tand tossed the purse at her, hard.  Two centuries of drilled reflex took it out of the air with knife-fighter aplomb.

“Thank you.”

The slave magnate turned away and headed for the door.  He paused, hand on the latch, and looked back at her.  The fire was out in his eyes now, and he looked merely – thoughtful.

“You know, my lady – you would be ill-advised to make an enemy of me.”

She should have left it alone, but the krin still sputtered and smoked in her like a pissed out camp-fire.  The words were out of her mouth before she knew it.

“I think you have that backwards, Tand.  I’ve seen better than you strapped to an execution board in the Chamber of Confidences.”

He held her gaze for a sober moment, then shrugged.

“Understood,” he said tonelessly.  “Thank you for your candour.”

He turned the latch and went outside to his men.  Archeth watched the door close on him, then cast about in the dampish, shit-smelling room as if she’d dropped something of value somewhere on the earthen floor. She closed her eyes briefly, too briefly, then forced herself to the door into the next room and the source of the keening.  She leaned there in the doorway, curiously unwilling to actually step over the threshold.

On the big sagging bed that constituted the room’s only real furniture, like huddled shipwreck survivors on some fortuitous raft, a young woman sat and hugged two young boys to her.  All three had had their clothing torn or sliced apart and now only the woman’s tight embrace held the remnants against their pallid flesh.  The eldest boy looked to be about ten or eleven, the younger more like six or seven.  Both their faces and bodies were marked, beginning to bruise.  The woman’s eyes were closed tight, one swollen cheek was gouged where someone had struck her, most likely with a belt-end or maybe just the back of a heavily-ringed hand.  Her lips were moving in some voiceless litany, but it was her throat the keening came from, the only sound she made, and she rocked in time with it, back and forth, back and forth, a rigid couple of inches either way.

Critlin was slumped on the ground near the doorway, curled into himself and crumpled back against the wall in a way that suggested he’d simply leaned there and slid down the stonework until the floor stopped him.  He was less than four feet from his family and staring at them as if they’d sailed from some harbour quay without him.  His left hand reached out for them, had got as far as resting on one of his own up-jutting knees, now hung there limp and lifeless.

Archeth swallowed and stepped into the room.  Crouched at Critlin’s side, tried to fold his nerveless fingers around the purse.  “Here.  Take this.”

He barely looked at her.

“Take – look, here – just fucking take it, will you.”

The purse hung in his hand a scant second.  Then  it tugged loose with its own weight, fell from his slackened grip and into the dirt he sat on.

Muffled clink of imperial silver within.

Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands.

She got up and backed out.

Went back through the room they’d tortured Critlin in, as if pushed by a gathering wind.  Yanked open the door and stepped out into the murky evening street.

Found a sword tip at her throat.

 

End Notes

Couple of late-breaking delights to round out the year.  The Cold Commands makes NPR’s best SF/F of the Year list, and thus finds itself in some very august company indeed.  Kind words from Annalee Newitz of Io9 fame.  (Many thanks to Linda Palapala and Milton Soong for the heads-up).  And the BSFA have a late but very thoughtful review with an equally enthusiastic tone .

Meantime, I was going to hold over the next work-in-progress extract until the New Year, hence maintaing an even three month spread between posts, but that’s just anal now isn’t it?  And it is Christmas, after all.  So – Ho-ho-ho, and enjoy……….

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Curious Case of the Totally Oblivious Author

Wow, was I late to this particular party.

The Steel Remains won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for best novel – in 2010!

How the hell did I miss this?

I vaguely remember my US publicist mentioning way back at the beginning of 2009 that it might be worth putting Steel up for the Spectrum, but I never heard any more after that and promptly forgot all about it.  Then I was in Australia for two months, then I was in games for two years – Stockholm, Vancouver, Frankfurt, London, New York, a fast blur of studios, hotel rooms and airport lounges and whoooooosh; that’s the sound of my work-life picking up velocity like some bullet train I’d inadvertently stumbled aboard, and I barely got the chance to look out the windows until early 2011, by which time I was speeding rapidly towards impending fatherhood.  Then the fallout from that particular impact – sleepless nights, a ripped and torn set of new priorities, vaccinations and doctor’s visits, a move to Spain, a book tour for The Cold Commands, a houseful of Christmas guests in a house we barely knew, soul-searching about where to base ourselves for the next couple of years, research and local colour, a slow but steady flow of friends and family to check out the new circumstances, an eventual return home to water damaged ceilings and faulty central heating and the search for suitable bilingual nurseries/toddler groups and – oh look, it’s late 2012.

Well, that’s my excuse anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

So apologies to the Spectrum judging committee and award administrators for my utter fucking silence on this subject for the last two years.  I am, of course, honoured to have won.  The gay communities on both sides of the Atlantic were very supportive of what I was trying to achieve in Steel and gave me a great deal of good press and enthusiasm.  This is the veritable cherry on the top of that response.

Ehm……could I have my award trophy now, please?

Incidentally, The Cold Commands got short-listed for the very same award this year, so it seems no-one’s bearing a grudge.  Didn’t win this time around, of course, but can you really blame them?  The judges must have figured they’d give it to someone who’d get around to saying thank you a bit more promptly…….

Sigh.

Something Beginning with P

So there you go – your basic alien monster movie.

You’ve got your dodgily-imagined alien planet with not very convincing unities of time and place, shot on location in some inhospitable corner of the globe in a bid to offer some naturalistic weirdness.  You’ve got your conveniently breathable air.  Your stock characters, your fairly predictable narrative arcs, your human victims in rapidly  dwindling supply.  You’ve got your monsters, cheaply done and looking like it, trading on a template already decades old.  You’ve got a bit of cod-philosophising thrown in, some side commentary on god and faith, a bit of standard-issue sexual tension.  You’ve got  your violent struggle, your poignant loss, a pleasingly conflagrative conclusion and a quietly emotive coda.

And you know what?

Somehow, it all holds together – you’re gripped despite yourself, swept along, enthralled.  It works (well, at least it did for me).

I’m talking, of course, about Pitch Black.

Oh, you thought I meant Prometheus?  Oh, fuck, no!  Whatever gave you that idea?

Well, okay it’s true Prometheus does feature monster effects that look like they cost about 50p to make and came courtesy of the reject pile from Fraggle Rock.  It’s true that the planetary vistas look like a widescreen version of some shot-in-a-Welsh-quarry episode of Doctor Who or Blake’s Seven. (And, somehow – don’t ask me how, I’m just the consumer here – both monsters and planet manage to look less convincing than their 33 year old FX counterparts in the original Alien).  It’s true that the script is littered with painfully crude Christian agit-prop, a factor made even more gapingly obvious by the deleted scenes my DVD copy came with.  But these things, oddly enough, are not what makes Prometheus such a profoundly dispiriting experience to watch.  Or at least, it’s not just those things……

See, I wanted to be fair.  I wanted to be sure this wasn’t my inner Alien geek sulking because Prometheus didn’t live up to my fond teenage recollections of the original movie.  I wanted to be sure it wasn’t my atheism, profoundly irritated by the invocation of gaahhd in conversations between supposedly hard-nosed adult professionals.

So, I went back and watched Pitch Black again, and lo and behold, despite the dodgily imagined alien world and the derivative monsters, Pitch Black is a great little movie.  Sure, it’s not paradigm-shifting or iconic in the way Alien was (its monsters are borrowed more or less wholesale from Geiger stock, for one thing), but then few movies are.  But the stock characters in Pitch Black behave in a way that’s coherent throughout; the religious ones strike interesting dialogue sparks off Vin Diesel’s avowedly materialist protagonist (and the religion itself is a decently imagined future faith, rather than something cut and pasted from contemporary middle class, middle American bible class); the narrative spine of the movie is tight and strong.  You care about the characters, you care about the outcome, there ae some truly powerful moments (eg – did not know who he was fucking with!) and even a few small surprises thrown in.  From pretty much the outset, your emotions are firmly engaged.

My strongest emotion while I watched Prometheus was irritation.  Or, more accurately, a kind of weary exasperation that could only occasionally be bothered to flicker into genuine annoyance.  And close behind that came boredom.  I watched because I’d paid for the rental and out of some vague professional interest.  But if, for some reason of parenting or other family emergency, I’d had to switch off the playback at any point, I’m pretty sure I would never have bothered to go back and finish it.  For me, Prometheus had all the savour of some SyFy channel spin-off show, and all the emotional punch of a TV movie from the after-lunch slot.  Prometheus is…….bland.  Massively so.  Prometheus is Alien for the Hallmark channel.

Recall the icky-snake-gets-in-your-helmet-and-then-orally-rapes-you sequence?  Recall how far out and distant the shot was?  And how fast it was over?  Now compare that with John Hurt’s iconic death in Alien – close in, juddering camera, a tangle of thrashing limbs and agony, violent splatter of blood, and it just went on and on.  That shit was horrific and personal, and you felt it as if you were there.  Prometheus’s snake-in-the-helmet scene needed some of the same – so tight in you felt the claustrophobia, you felt as if you were in there with that guy and no way to even twist aside, let alone run.  Recall the big-tentacled-thing-grabs-engineer sequence?  Was it just me, or did it remind anyone else of one of the monsters from sixties TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, or – let’s be charitable – maybe Space 1999 circa 1977.  Compare that with Veronica Cartwright’s superbly performed death in the original Alien – the tears, the weeping begging, the awful inevitability as that barbed tail slides out across the floor and up to gather her obscenely in, the sheer terror so suffocating that you were fucking relieved when the scene switched back to Ripley and the sound of Lambert’s death screams over the intercom.

See what I’m driving at here?

Did anyone notice that Prometheus was a fifteen certificate?  Did anyone else notice how little actual blood or actual horror there actually was?

Ah.

Okay, Richard – so look, with such vast acreage of Meh under your belt, why the long post?  Why get so hot under the collar after your professed boredom and mild irritation?

Well, boredom and weary exasperation were my feelings while I was watching the movie.

The anger came later.

Because it’s my feeling that this movie is something of a canary in a coal mine for the genre.  Not that it’s the first such, not that the floor of the genre cage isn’t littered with other stiff little feathered corpses, but still, this one feels kind of pivotal.  Once again, we’re seeing – having rammed down our throats rather like that snake in the helmet – a vision that assumes the audience for SF consists entirely of brain-dead teenagers and franchise geeks with the emotional range and imaginative capacity of a Skinner pigeon.  Keep the age certification down for christ’s sake, otherwise we lose our core audience.  Pander to the values of the antiquated middle class middle American cabal that is the MPAA (anyone seen This Movie Is Not Yet Rated) and we’ll keep our certification down.  Reference the genre canon, and we’ll get the fans on board.  Stick to superhero comic book story-telling – that’s all this sic-fi crowd can relate to, y’know.  Seriously – we’ll make a fucking pile of money.

If Prometheus had just been a seriously crap movie, I guess it would have been okay.  There’s a lot of it about, as Theodore Sturgeon will tell you.  But Prometheus is not just a seriously crap movie – it’s also a profoundly cynical exercise in franchise mining, and that sticks in my throat.  (As, to be honest, do the piss-poor monster effects – quite how you spend a hundred and thirty million dollars and end up with monsters less convincing than those in movies made decades earlier and costing a tenth as much, I’m not quite sure – maybe by the time you’ve paid for all the obscenely under-used, pissed-away acting and directing talent out of that one hundred and thirty million, there’s not a lot left for SFX.  Or maybe it all went on marketing.)  Prometheus set out to cold-bloodedly co-opt one of the finest genre movie IPs around, and milk it until it bled.  And they got away with it.  That’s what stings.  That’s what puts me on the verge of despair for the future of the genre on screen.

To paraphrase the Manic Street Preachers, if you tolerate Lost, then your genre crown jewels will be next.

And – you know what – I take back every disparaging thing I ever said about Avatar.  Compared to Prometheus, Avatar was a thing of beauty, a towering masterpiece of cinematic achievement – stunning special effects, a coherent narrative, an intelligent and even vaguely subversive thematic base.  Acting talent being deployed, used to good human effect.  Directorial talent stretching itself to the available limits.  And  - perhaps most important of all, something I didn’t actually see at the time, because it’s taken Prometheus to ram the point home – Avatar was quite clearly a passionate labour of love on the part of its makers.

I didn’t like it especially, but you can’t argue with that passion.  And you can’t overstate the worth that passion brings to art.

Nor the novocaine numbness that you get when it isn’t there.

 

Rampant Imperialism

A date for your diaries if you live in or within reasonable striking distance of London.  This coming February 16th and 17th, I’ll be Guest of Honour at Imperial College’s PicoCon.

As you’ll see from this link, I am not alone in this – fellow GoHs are:

Peter F. Hamilton - distinguished doyen of British SF who very kindly gave Altered Carbon a booster rocket of a blurb back when I was starting out, sent champagne to me on my first US book tour, and fed me one evening during Eastercon 2005 in the bosom of his own home, while also juggling the – I now appreciate – myriad heavy demands of early fatherhood.

Steph Swainston - one of the finest fantasy stylists to emerge this young century, whose work has been a subtle but pervasive influence on the Land Fit for Heroes novels, who knows – and holds – her whisky better than any man I know,  and who lent me a book about seven years ago which I still haven’t returned – sorry Steph, will bring it down.

Kate Griffin/Catherine Webb - whom, uhm, I confess I know nothing at all about, but who is, I’m sure very talented and lovely to talk to.

So look, there’s really no decent excuse not to attend.  Right?

See you there!

The Anti-Prometheus

Just saw Red State, and for me the ways in which it’s the antithesis of Prometheus are legion.  Just for starters: I knew nothing about it, I had no expectations or anticipation going in, and I’m not a fan of its director.  Prometheus is stuffed full of top drawer acting talent and big names.  Red State has a cast that – with the exception of John Goodman – I’ve barely heard of.  Prometheus was budgeted at 130 million dollars (if you believe Wikipedia), Red State got made for under 4 million.  Prometheus, before the reviews came in, I would gladly have shelled out a tenner plus to see in 3D splendour at my local multiplex.  Red State showed up through the door on DVD via my wife’s Love Film selection, and I nearly didn’t bother watching it at all (fifteen months into fatherhood, the twin needs for sleep and productive work hours hold me in a thrall previously unimaginable).

The prospect of viewing Prometheus at some future moment leaves me profoundly dispirited.  I suppose I shall have to, professional interest and all.  Seeing Red State left me energised and inspired.  It reminded me why I love movies, why I love story-telling and ultimately why I write myself.

I’m going to reserve more definitive comment on contrasts within the material of each film until such time as I have – dispiritedly – shelled out for a DVD rental of Prometheus and actually seen it, because anything else would be grossly unfair.  But I think some early estimations are in order.  Prometheus appears, from the reports I’ve read, to be a soulless, confusing mish-mash of all that cool stuff you saw in that other movie and wanted more of.   Red State is an utterly fresh and soulful mish-mash that works.  Prometheus’s plot was going to be predictable from the get-go (which, NB, is not necessarily in itself a failing in a movie – it was also true of the original Alien).  Red State was quite literally impossible for me to predict at any point past the initial twenty minutes in.  Prometheus – apparently – looks for horror in CGI and the outer limits.  Red State finds horror right next door and delivers it with scripted speech and tightly constructed human dynamics.  Prometheus trumpets its philosophical concerns in full orchestral grandeur, from the earliest trailers on in – we’re after Life, the Universe and Everything here.  Red State delivers a pair of taut little lectures on current religious and political state-of-play and leaves you to ponder.

Prometheus has taken over four hundred million dollars at the box office.  Red State has just about made back its four million budget and change.

There’s a lesson in this somewhere, but I’m still not sure exactly what it is.  I’ll get back to you.

Early Sighting

A little something from the Gollancz art department…..

Visitation Rites

He felt the change as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the croft.  It came on like icy water, sprinkling across the nape of his neck and his shoulders.

He tilted his head a little to send the feeling away, traced a warding glyph in the air, like taking down a volume from a library shelf.  Around him, the croft walls grew back to an enclosing height they likely hadn’t seen in decades.  The boiling grey sky blacked out, replaced with damp smelling thatch overhead.  A dull, reddish glow reached out to him from the hearth.  Peat smoke stung his throat.  He heard the hoarse whistle of breathing, the creak of……

A worn oak rocking chair, angled at the fireside, tilting gently back and forth.  From where he stood, Ringil could not tell what was seated there, only that it was wrapped in a dark cloak and cowl.

The ward he’d chosen was burning down around him like some torched peasant’s hut.  He felt the fresh exposure shiver through him.  Reached for something stronger, cracked finger-bones etching it into the air.

“Yes – becoming quite adept at that, aren’t we.”  It was a voice that creaked like the chair.  Wheeze and rustle of seeming age, or maybe just the breathlessness at the end of laughing too hard at something.  “Quite the master of the ikinri ‘ska these days.”

His fresh ward shattered apart, no better than the first – the chill of the Presence rushed in on him.  The rocking chair jerked violently around, from no agency he could see.  The thing it held was a corpse.  The shrunken mounds it made within the wrap of the cloak were unmistakeable, the way it skewed awkwardly in the seat, as if blown there by the wind.  The cowl was tipped forward like the muzzle of some huge dark worm, shrouding the face.  One ivory-pallid hand gripped an armrest, flesh shrunk back from long, curving nails.  The other arm lay in the thing’s lap, was covered by the way the cloak folded there.

Even as the chill blew through him, something about that fact was scratching for attention at the limen of his being.

His hand leapt up, across, closed on the hilt of the Ravensfriend where it jutted over his left shoulder.

“Oh, please,” creaked the voice.  “Put that away, why don’t you.  If I can break your wards like sticks for kindling, how hard do you think it’s going to be for me to break that dinky little sword of yours as well?  You know, for an up-and-coming sorcerer, you show remarkably little breadth of response.”

Ringil let go the Ravensfriend, felt the pommel slip through his hands as the Kiriath-engineered scabbard sucked the handsbreadth of exposed blade back into itself.  He eyed the slumped form before him and held down the repeated urge to shiver.

“Who are you?”

“And still he does not know me.”  Abruptly, the corpse loomed to its feet, out of the chair as if tugged there by puppet’s strings.  Ringil found himself face to face with the worm’s head cowl and the blank darkness it framed.  He made himself stare back, but if there was a face in there, dead or alive, it didn’t show.  The whispering voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, down from the eaves of the thatch, out of the crackle of the hearth, out of the air just behind his ear.  “You did not know me at Trelayne’s Eastern Gate, when your destiny was laid out in terms you could understand; you did not know me at the river when the first of the cold legion gathered to you, and your passage to the dark gate began.  I sent a whole shipload of corpses for you when you were finally ready.  So tell me, Ringil Eskiath – how many times must I look out at you through the eyes of the dead before I am given my due?”

It fell in on him like the thatched roof coming down on his head.  The cloak and cowl, the stylised placement of hands, one raised to the arm of the chair, the other gathered in the lap, holding-

  “Fifirdar?”

“Oh, well done.”  The corpse turned and shuffled away from him, back towards the hearth.  “Took you long enough, didn’t it?  Wouldn’t have thought it’d be so hard to recognise the Queen of the Dark Court when she comes calling.  We are your ancestral gods, are we not?”

“Not by my choice,” he said starkly.

But through his head it went, all the same – the call-and-response prayer to the Mistress of Dice and Death:

 

Firfirdar sits

Upon her molten iron throne

And is not touched

By fire

 

Is kernel heart of darkness to the blaze

 

It was ingrained – a decade of foot-dragging attendance at the Eskiath family temple, every week like clockwork until, finally, at fifteen years of age, he found the words to face his father down and refuse the charade.

By then, though, the cant was worked into his brain like tanner’s dung.

 

Firfirdar smiles

In shadows lit by liquid fire

And holds the dice

Of days

 

Holds dice for all, and all that is to come   

 

 

Firfirdar lifts

The dice of days in one cold hand

And blows them free

In fire

 

Blows luck like sparks from out the forge of fate

 

“Yes, well.”  The corpse bent stiffly into the shadows beside the fire-glow and the pallid, long-nailed hand reached a poker from its resting place against the stonework.  Firfirdar prodded at the fire, and a log fell loose, cascading embers.  “Fortunately, we’re not all dependent on your choices in such matters.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Oh.”  The poker stabbed into the hearth a couple more times.  Sparks billowed up the chimney. The voice rustled about in the flicker-lit, haunted spaces of the croft.  “You were passing.  It seemed as good a time as any.”

“You know, for a goddess of death and destiny, you show remarkably little sense of divine grandeur.”

The corpse leaned over the hearth, cowl pressed to the low stone mantelpiece as if tired by its exertions.  The echo of Ringil’s words seemed to hang in the silence.  For a long, cold-sweat moment, he wondered if the dark queen would take offence.

His fingers flexed and formed a brief fist -

Look, I won’t lie to you, Gil.  No ikinri ‘ska ward is going to actually back down a member of the Dark Court.  Hjel the Dispossessed, almost apologetic when Ringil asks him.  It’s his magic, after all, his heritage he’s teaching here.  But if you throw enough of them around, well – a faint shrug – you might buy yourself some time, I suppose.

  Time to do what?

But to that, he gets no answer beyond the gypsy prince’s customary slipshod grin.  Hjel is not what you’d call a consistent guide.

What he is, exactly, Ringil has yet to work out.

- and so….

He loosened the fist, forced his fingers to hang slack.  Waited for the dark queen’s response

“Funny.”  The corpse had not moved, was still bent there over the hearth.  It was as if Fifirdar was talking to the flames. “Yes.  They did say that.  That you think you’re funny.”

A thick silence poured into the croft behind the hiss in that final word.  All the hairs on Ringil’s forearms and the back of his neck leapt erect.  He mastered the shudder, thrust it down and stared at the hunched black form. The shifting infinite possibilities of the ikinri ‘ska, swirling like water just below his fingertips…..

The corpse straightened up.  Set the poker aside in the shadows by the wall.

“We’re wasting time,” said Firfirdar sibilantly.  “I am not your enemy. You would not still be standing there if I were.”

“Perhaps not.”  Behind the mask he kept, a cool relief went pummeling through his veins.  He let the ikinri ‘ska subside.  “But please don’t claim the Dark Court has my best interests at heart either.  I’ve read a few too many hero legends to believe that.”

“Legends are written down by mortals, floundering in the details of their world, seeking significance for their acts where usually there is none.”  The corpse hobbled back to its seat by the fire.  “You would do well not to set too much store by such tales.”

“Is it inaccurate, then, my lady, to say that heroes in the service of the Court rarely end well?”

“Men who carry steel upon their backs and live by it rarely end well.  It would be a little unjust to blame the gods for that, don’t you think?”

Ringil grimaced.  “The Mistress of Dice and Death complains to me of injustice?  Have you not being paying attention lately, my lady?  Injustice is the fashion – for the last several thousand years at least, as near as I can determine. I think it unlikely the Dark Court has not had a hand in any of it.”

“Well, our attention has been known to wander.”  It was hard to be sure with that whispering, rustling voice, but the dark queen seemed amused.  “But we are focused on you now, which is what counts.  Rejoice, Ringil Eskiath – we are here to help.”

“Really?  The lady Kwelgrish gave me to understand that mortal affairs are a game you play at.  It’s hard to rejoice in being treated as a piece in a game.”

Quiet.  The corpse lolled back in the rocking chair’s embrace.  The nails of its left hand tapped at the wooden arm-rest, like the click of dice in a cupped palm.

“Kwelgrish is…….forthright, by the standards of the Court.”

“You mean she shouldn’t have told me?”

The soft crackle of the fire in the hearth.  Gil thought, uneasily, that the leaping shadows painted on the wall behind Firfirdar were a little too high and animated to fit the modest flames in the hearth that supposedly threw them.  A little too shaped, as well, a little too suggestive of upward tilted jaws and teeth, as if some invisible, inaudible dog-pack surged and clamoured there in the gloom behind the dark queen’s chair, waiting to be unleashed…..

Very slowly, the corpse lifted both hands to the edges of the cowl it wore.  Lifted the dark cloth back and up, off the visage it covered.

The breath stopped in Ringil’s throat.

With an effort of will, he held himself immobile.  Looked back into Firfirdar’s eyes.

It was not that the corpse she had chosen was hideous with decay – far from it.  Apart from a tell-tale pallor and a sunken look around the eyes, it was a face that might still have belonged with the living.

But it was beautiful.

It was the face of some fine-featured, consumptive youth you’d readily kiss and risk infection for, a face you might lose yourself in one haunted back-alley night, wake the next day without and spend fruitless years searching the stew of streets for again.  It was a face that gathered you in, that beckoned you away, that rendered all thought of safety and common sense futile.

It was a face you’d go to gladly, when the time came; no regrets and nothing left behind but the faint and fading smile printed on your cooling lips.

  “Do you see me, Ringil Eskiath?” asked the hissing, whispering voice.

It was like flandrijn fumes through his head, like stumbling on a step that suddenly wasn’t there.  He reeled and swayed from the force of it, and the corpse’s mouth did not move at all and the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  “Do you see me now?”

Out of the seething, chilling confusion of his own consciousness, Ringil mustered the will to stay on his feet.  He drew in breath, hard.

“Yes,” he said.  “I see you.”

“Then let us understand each other.  It isn’t easy being a god, but some of us are better at it than others.  Kwelgrish has her intricate games and her irony, Dakovash his constant rage and disappointment with mortals, and Hoiran just likes to watch.  But I am none of these.  You would be ill-advised to judge me as if I were.  Is that clear?”

Ringil swallowed, dry-throated.  Nodded.

“That’s good.”  The corpse raised pallid hands once more and lifted the cowl back in place.  Something went out of the space around them, as if someone had opened a window somewhere to let in fresh air.  “Now – to the business at hand.  Walk with me, Ringil Eskiath.  Convince me that my fellow gods have not been overly optimistic in their assessment of your worth.”

“Walk with you whe-”

The fire billowed upward in the hearth, blinded him where he stood.  Soundless detonation that deafens his gaze.  The croft walls and thatch ripped back, no more substantial than a Majak yurt torn away by cyclone winds.  He thought he caught a glimpse of them borne away at some angle it hurt his eyes to look at.  Gone, all gone.  He blinked – shakes his head – is standing suddenly before a roaring bonfire, on a deserted beach, under an eerily luminescent sky.

“Walk with me here,” says Firfirdar quietly.

She’s unhooded again, it’s the same achingly beautiful dying youth’s face, but here it seems not to have the power it had back in the croft.  Or maybe it’s him – maybe he has a power here the real world will not permit him.  Either way there’s no punch-to-the-guts menace, no fracturing of his will and sense of self.  Instead, he thinks, the Mistress of Dice and Death looks overwhelmingly saddened by something, and maybe a little lost.

“There is not much time,” she murmurs.  “The dwenda have found a way back – though back is a relative term, as they’ll discover soon enough – and with them comes every dark thing men have ever feared.”

Ringil shivers.  There’s a hard wind coming off the sea, stoking the bonfire, whipping the flames off it like spray from storm-driven waves, and leaching the heat away.

“Then stop them, why don’t you.”

A gossamer smile touches Firfirdar’s mouth at the corners, but it’s etched with that same sadness.  Her eyes tilt to the sky.

“That was tried,” she says quietly.  “Once.  And your sky still bears the scars.”

He follows her gaze upward.  The source of the eerie radiance slips from behind the clouds – the dying, pockmarked little sun he’s heard the dwenda call muhn.  He shrugs.

“So try it again.”

“It will not be permitted again.  Even if we could find some way to press upon the sky as hard and deeply as before, such powers must remain leashed.  That was the pact, the gift of mending the book-keepers gave.  We are bound by the codes they wrote.”

Ringil stares into the orange-red heart of the bonfire, as if he could pull some of its heat out and into himself.  “So much for the gods.  Maybe I should just talk to one of these book-keepers instead.”

“You already have, Ringil Eskiath.  How else would you have returned through the dark gate except with its blessing?  How else would you have come back from the crossroads?”

Memory stabs at him on that last word.  The creature at the cross-roads, the book it held in its multiple arms.  The razor talons it touched him with.

  I should hate to tear you asunder.  You show a lot of promise.

The branches buried in the heart of the fire suddenly look a lot like bones in a pyre.  He turns away.  He stares away along the shoreline, where the wind is piling up waves and dumping them out incessantly on the sand.  Over the sound it makes, he grows aware that Firfirdar is watching him.

“That was the book keeper?” he asks reluctantly.

“One of them, yes.”

He locks down another shiver.  Sets his jaw.  “I was under the impression that I owed my passage through the dark gate to Kwelgrish and Dakovash.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, you do.  But – come.”  Firfirdar gestures, away along the ghost-lit beach and into the gloom.  “Walk with me.  All will become clear.”

“Yeah?”  Ringil grimaces.  “That’d be a first.”

But he walks with her anyway, away from the useless glare of the bonfire, the heat it apparently cannot give him unless – the thought pops into his head unsought – he throws himself into its charnel heart and lets himself burn.

And that’d be a stupid thing to do.

So yes, he lets the dark queen link her arm through his – he can feel the chill it gives off through his clothing and hers – and she leads him away, under the dwenda muhn.

In the ghost light it casts, he notices, her feet leave no trace on the sand.

And, after a while, nor do his.

Oh dear oh dear oh fucking dear

A couple of months ago, in comments, I mentioned that while I was really looking forward to the upcoming Prometheus, I had some reservations:

“Yeah, I’m stoked too – killer cast, killer director and production crew. Could be something really special indeed.

But……

I confess to a couple of niggling worries:

First, is it just me, or does all the buzz about Massive Archetypal Themes, the Very Origins of the Human Race etc etc…. seem a bit overblown?

I mean, the original Alien was so humanly small-scale and scruffy – a tired, grumpy, half-assed freighter crew get tossed into a maelstrom of corporate betrayal and environmental hazard. All they want is to get home in one piece and get paid. Then all they want is to get home in one piece. Then all they want is not to die. Powerful thematic narrative ensues, embedded in these very mundane concerns.

I worry that Prometheus, in shooting for Massively Meaningful, is going to run the risk of coming off bombastic.

Secondly (and related, I think), is it just me, or does explaining the derelict, the space jockey and the eggs rob them of a lot of their power?

I know, I know we all want to know – but therein lies the power of the original movie; it’s an unrequited desire. We never do find out what that shit was all about, and that’s what makes it sublimely creepy and mysterious. Maybe the space jockey was the last remnant of just another grumpy half-assed freighter crew just trying to get home and get paid – a million years ago. Or a thousand, who knows? Maybe his kind are gone, maybe they’re not; maybe we’ll meet them round the next corner. Maybe the eggs were a random hazardous cargo, maybe an infestation, or okay, yeah, maybe a weapon and the space jockey some kind of biological warfare bomber pilot. Or maybe the xenomorphs and eggs are some part of the space jockey race’s own lifecycle that somehow got out of hand. It’s all maybes, and that’s what lends it power: We Will Never Know. The universe is ancient and infinite and strange – feel its cold breath on the nape of your neck.

By offering an explanation, by actually solving the mystery, you undercut the chill of Not Knowing – AND you run the risk of your explanation being nowhere near as cool or scary as the audience’s own various speculations on the subject. So your explanation needs to be Pretty Fucking Chilling and Cool, if it’s going to deliver over and above those risks it runs. I worry that it won’t be, that in fact it’ll be trite and Scy Fy channel dumbed down.

Truly hope I’m wrong, on both counts.”

So, now I’m thinking about changing my name to Cassandra

It’s as if Damon Lindelof got hold of a time machine a couple of years ago, zipped ahead to April 2012, and then went back and said “Hey, there’s this mid-list SF author called Morgan who’s got a bunch of misgivings about this movie. I know, let’s write a screenplay based entirely on those misgivings.

Or maybe it’s just that hiring the writer responsible for Lost to update what was the darkest, nastiest, most powerful SF movie franchise ever devised is a bit like setting out to re-make Sergio Leone’s Dollar Trilogy with the cast of the Muppet Show.  Feasible in theory, but why the fuck would you do it?

Now, I hasten to add that haven’t actually seen Prometheus yet myself.  And I suppose that Mr Rothwell there could (for reasons I confess I’m rather hard-pressed to imagine) be lying his arse off about the movie.  But you know what – he’d be far from the only one (though certainly the most hilarious so far).  No, I think, all things considered, this one is going to take the same priority place as the rather poor and wholly unnecessary The Thing prequel – i.e. rent it at Global Video some time when I’ve got nothing better to do and  can’t find anything more promising to watch.

Oh, well – it all saves on baby sitting, I guess…..

Sigh.