Tom Pollock's Blog, page 5

On readers

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This is an apology.

I just finished writing the acknowledgments for The Glass Republic. I  thanked my publisher, my agent, my family but for the second time in a row, I left some people out. I forgot to thank the readers.

Shit, I’m sorry. I thought readers went without saying, but people ‘going without saying’ has a way of turning into people ‘going without due credit’ so in the spirit that coming late to the party is better than not showing up, I’m saying it now.

Readers make a story, at least as much as an author does. That’s not a rhetorical pose, it’s not a protestation of false modesty, it is, as far as I can see, a simple, ontological fact.

A bunch of words printed on a page aren’t a story. A story isn’t a story until it’s read.  Oliphaunts don’t get their tusks or their heft,  dark towers  don’t become tall or forbidding,  heroes don’t become heroes and lovers don’t become lovers (and for that matter Railwraiths don’t become railwraiths) until a reader takes them, flexes their imaginative muscles and shapes them into their conceptions of those things. And the fact that it’s their conceptions can’t be overemphasized. It’s vital. Readers aren’t computers you can feed a story-programme into and watch it emerge onto their screens, the same each time. Every reading is unique.

So far, so obvious, right? Except that that one obvious fact has a simple corollary, one that the language we use when we talk about this stuff (‘the author, the book I wrote’ etc) totally fails to capture:

In a sense* I, and every other author out there, am in a creative partnership with the people who read my stuff.

Now, that might look like it’s me trying to be adorably humble, but it’s actually the most self-aggrandizing thing I’ve ever said.

For one thing, following from the above, The City’s Son’s not just one story. It’s a different story – not just for every reader –  but for every time the book is read. Rather than being the author of one tale, I’m a collaborator in many. I just exponentially multiplied my productivity! My editor will be thrilled.  (Granted all the stories will be pretty similar, but that never did David Eddings any harm. )

What’s even cooler? Most of these stories are collaborations with  –  and only exist in the minds of –  people I’ve never even met.

The other reason this idea is self-aggrandizing is this.  I’ve written two and a half books (yes Skyscraper Three is a bit behind schedule, yes, I’ll catch up), but I’ve read countless more. So by this way of thinking I’ve worked with Jane Austen and China Miéville and John Le Carré and Ursula Le Guin, all on little tiny works of art that exist between my ears.  I’ve collaborated with people I don’t share a language with, people who died hundreds of years before I was born, and did so using a technology that’s existed for millennia. And so have you.

So, without wanting to sound trite, thank you. It’s been a total pleasure working with you. You guys fucking rock.

*Philosophical rather than legal, but still important.

P.S. This, by the way, is the reason there’s no such thing as a ‘wrong way to read’ a story, or ‘reading too much into’ a story. There’s just the creation of a new story, over and over again, and that story will be however you’ve read it. It can’t be otherwise.

 

P.P.S What I’d like to say, but I’m less sure about, is that every time we engage in a conversation with each other that alters our perception of the stories we’re working with each other on editing them, but, hey, it’s something to think about.)

And Here… We… Go.

It’s been a long wait, but The Glass Republic will be stepping out of a mirror near you in a little under two months time, and well… I’m excited enough that I think my skeleton’s about to vibrate its way out of my skin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m excited to return to this world and these characters, I’m excited because this is Pen’s book and I love Pen to bits, but most of all I’m excited because (whisper it quietly) I’m really quite proud of this one.

To put it out into the world, the wonderful folks at Forbidden Planet are giving us  a wee launch bash on 2nd August. You can join up at Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/460914767331711/?notif_t=plan_user_joined

The plan goes as follows:

I bake brownies

You eat brownies

I read, answer questions, sign stuff etc.

We all head to a-to-be-appointed nearby hostelry for encore in merriment.

It would be unfeasibly badass to see you there.

R.I.P. Iain M. Banks

As I’m sure everyone reading this already knows, Iain Banks died today.

Inversions was the first SF novel I ever read. It made me love the genre and, if stories really are  little pieces of the people who write them, it made me love the man as well. Fifteen years ( a relatively short time by Banks-reader’s standards) of reading his other stories only strengthened that love. I never met him, and to those who did I can only offer the heartfelt condolences of a stranger.

To the man himself, I just want to say: goodbye, sir, and thank you.

 

The Power! The Power!

So, nominations for the World Fantasy Awards close on Friday, and since I’m going to be at the con in Brighton in November (Can I get a mmmm  yeah for hot seaside donuts?) I get to vote.  Here’s what I’m nominating for a miniature cast of Lovecraft’s mug, and why:

Boneland by Alan Garner –   As far as I can tell, this an utterly unique project. I reviewed it for Pornokitsch, but to rehash: it’s an adult novel to conclude what hitherto had been a children’s trilogy, published some 50 years after volume two. Bonkers right? And brilliant. Like all Garner, it’s beautifully and deceptively simply written, but judging it on the usual criteria simply won’t do.

To get the best out of this novel you have to encounter it (as I think most of its readers will, and I’m convinced this is deliberate,) as someone who has grown up since reading the first two volumes; someone for whom the events of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath are memories half buried under the detritus of adulthood. Boneland triggers the resurgence of those memories and uses them to place you in a quite terrifying state of empathy with its protagonist. It is –  and I don’t say this lightly – truly haunting.

A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge - No one nails the balance of whimsy and menace that characterizes a good fairy tale the way that Hardinge does.

Add ferociously creative world building (hallucinogenic cheeses; predatory, non-euclidean caves and the mad spelunking cartographers who worship them; an entire society taught to dissemble at birth) to a deft hand with social themes, depict in knowing, luminous prose, and you get one of the best-composed fantasy novels for any and all age-groups I’ve ever read. The plot’s clever too. I had at least one a ha moment.

 

 

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan – Ok, let’s have the argument then. Is it Fantasy or is it Literary fiction? Yes. Move on.

A little less flippantly, The Panopticon is a first person narrative in which the narrator, Anais, sees, and appears to believe in, flying cats and a sinister-all controlling conspiracy conducted by men with no noses.  Whether, in the world of the novel, those things really exist or she’s hallucinating them is an unanswerable question. All there is to the world of the novel is what’s on the page, and that’s filtered through Anais’s perspective. What we can say is that the effect of these elements –  providing moments of surreal wonder, estranging us from our mundane environment -  are precisely the same as the effect of good urban fantasy. What’s more, Fagan’s balance of tone in this book really is something: pitch black, laugh out loud humour set against some of the most heart-wrenching pathos I’ve read this year. It’s a masterclass. Whether The Panopticon is fantasy, or meta-fantasy, it belongs on the list.

Railsea by China Miéville -  Its arguably science-fiction, rather than fantasy, but really, who the hell cares? Another one I reviewed earlier, another YA novel, and I think, considerably better than Mieville’s earlier YA effort in Un Lun Dun.  Why? Well it’s Moby Dick done on land with trains rather than ships and a giant yellow mole instead of a great white whale. For kids. You have to love the chutzpah of it. It’s splendidly achieved too: fun, relatable characters, cool salvage tech and (as ever) splendid monsters. Also: a slightly meta, Brechtian voice which even though it jarred me a little, is all evidence of the relentless ambition of the narrative and its refusal to talk down to its readers. Hands down winner of the extended-metaphor-of-the-year-award. and the best ending I read in a fantasy novel last year, too.

 

 The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin  – Why nominate it? Probably the closest thing to a traditional secondary world fantasy on this list, The Killing Moon is a very, very good one. The world, a kind of Ancient Egypt-inspired morphocracy, is brilliantly realized;  displaying a rare kind of cultural, religious and political coherence.  Jemisin also has a knack for characters who are morally compromised without being morally alien, and who carry our understanding, if not always our sympathies, into dreadful deeds. She does a good line in writing about more than one kind of love, too. Also: dream-harvesting ninja priests.  Cool, yes? Thought so.

Which of these would I like to win? Probably Boneland. It utterly wrecked me.  As with everyone, my options are restricted by those books I’ve actually read. Books I’ve not read, but based on other people’s reviews would also like to see on the shortlist, include: The Brides of Rollrock Island, Seraphina, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairy Land and led the Revels There and The King’s Blood. 

What are you guys putting forward?

Glengarry Glen Dove

A couple of days ago I ran across the Dove ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ video that’s been making the rounds.

[The TLDW précis – A series of women describe themselves while a former police sketch artist behind a curtain draws them. That same sketch artist then redraws the same women, but this time based on the description of strangers who’ve just been introduced to them. The women are then shown the pictures side by side, and they realize that they’ve describe themselves in what are (in the terms of the ad) harsher or more pejorative terms than the strangers. They don’t know how beautiful they are.]

Now, it’s a beautifully put together video, but something about it made me a bit queasy. There was a tang of fakeness about it, like the metallic aftertaste of aspartame in a can of diet coke.  There was, I couldn’t help feeling, something actually quite nasty about that two and a half minute clip. Something, dare I say it, sketchy.

The internet at large on the other hand (with some exceptions, like Jazz here), seems to love it. It’s been viewed some 8 million times on YouTube and is being reposted on Facebook with comments like “All girls should watch this.”  The top comment on YouTube concludes “Basically this is saying people don’t realize how good they look.”

Except no, that’s not what the film is saying, at least not all of it. It’s not the point of the video. That comes 2 mins and 15 seconds in, when one of the women says:

“I should be more grateful for my natural beauty, it impacts the choices and friends we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children, it impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.’

There. That. Jazz is spot on to highlight it.  That’s what this video is about. That’s the payload this particular rocket was designed to deliver. And the way I know that, is that it’s an advert, and that’s the message which is telling you that you need what they want you to buy.

I watched the video again, and little bits phrasing popped out at me – the constant casting of ‘thin’ in positive terms ‘She was thin, so you could see her cheekbones.’  ‘A nice thin chin’ and then the sly, vicious juxtaposition of ‘she seems fatter and… sadder.’

It’s difficult not to feel like Dove are playing good cop here, after Heat and Vogue’s bad cops have thrown you down the stairs to cells and threatened them with life without parole. She might be nicer about it, but that doesn’t mean Good Cop wants your confession any less. She and Bad Cop are a team.

There’s one video I watched again recently (thanks to this piece on Cracked), that the Dove sketch Ad did remind me of –

Key phrases: ‘Only one thing counts in this life. Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you. Go home and play with your kids. If you want to work here, CLOSE.’

In tone, it couldn’t be more different from the Dove ad’s soft focus and plinky-plonky (a technical term) piano, but the core message is structurally identical. There is precisely one aspect of you that is interesting and important. One. Pay close attention, I’m going to suggest something you can do to make it better.

It’s probably not that surprising that underneath the cosmetics, the Dove video is the same as Blake’s rant. The Dove ad execs are salespeople after all. If anyone at Campaign For Natural Beauty HQ actually did come up with an ad that told prospective customers that they ought to worry about their looks less – that really did communicate the vital, if clichéd truth that physical beauty is, and should be, way less important that the media makes it out to be – you know what they’d hear from their boss?

“Fuck you. If you wanna work here, CLOSE.”

This isn’t really meant to be me yelling at Dove. They’re just doing what advertisers do. Rather, what intrigues me about the response the Dove ad has gotten is that people are relating to it like it isn’t just an advert. And maybe they’re right to. The video is indicative of a world where marketing has become so ubiquitous and so evolved that it’s moved beyond simply being a tool to sell us things. And the more we are saturated by marketing, the more the boundaries between marketing and everything else begin to blur. The easier it is for us to forget its an ad at all.

As Andy Warhol demonstrated, branding can be art. It can tell us things that are interesting and maybe even true. The Dove Ad does that. A lot of us are our own harshest critics. But even so, not just an ad is still an ad. It’s still selling, and that truth is the spoonful of sugar that helps their medicine go down.

Somebody said recently, I can’t remember who, that in Capitalist Democracies, buying is voting. And if buying is voting, then advertising, in seeking to influence that vote is argument, debate, propaganda. It can be informative sure, it can even be beautiful, but when we live in a world where it’s growing  tough to tell what is, and isn’t an ad, it’s increasingly important to ask, when watching any piece of media: ‘Who paid for this? And what do they want me to pay for next?’

 

Djinn & Tronic – An aside to the Clarke Award Shortlist Debate

 

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So the Clarke Award shortlist is out and everyone is, understandably, talking about how there aren’t any women on it. (There aren’t any non-white people on it either, but people seem to be discussing this less.)

Having sussed out beforehand this might prove an issue, Liz Williams, one of this year’s judges, was prepared, and immediately took to the Guardian to explain why. One of the phrases she used particularly struck me:

“This leads us into the wider conversation as to why, despite having a significantly enlarged entry this year (a 36 per cent increase on the 60 books submitted in 2012) we received disproportionately fewer from women, of which many were technically fantasy.” (My emphasis)

To which I’m inclined to respond: ‘So…?’

And rather less flippantly, so what if they’re fantasy, why should that stop them from being SF as well?

Genres are versatile things. But it makes very little sense to think of them as mutually exclusive. For starters, a lot of the time the things which mark them out belong to completely different parts of the story: romance and crime tend to be indicated by plot, SF and Fantasy and historical by setting, Litfic by style and so on. Take SF and erotica for example – no amount of bonking is going change the fact a book’s set on a ship with an FTL drive, so in what sense isn’t it in both genres?

And if SF and erotica can co-exist, why not SF and fantasy? Aha! I hear you cry (Yes, you may be in Aberdeen, but I have very good hearing). But SF and Fantasy are both setting driven genres, so maybe there they are mutually exclusive? To which argument I’m afraid I blow a big fat raspberry. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a Fantasy Novel (it has magic in it) but it’s also a Historical novel (Set during the Napoleonic wars). If instead of being set 300 years in the past it were set 300 years in the future, and still had magic in it, wouldn’t it neatly straddle both sides of the SF/F slash?

One of the books that’s being much discussed as having been overlooked on this year’s Clarke list is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. Now, merits of the book aside (and I’ve heard both positive and negative) the main reason people are positing for its exclusion from the list is that it’s Fantasy. Indeed, Alif does include Djinn and such, but (and I’m only a quarter of the way in) it also seems to display a distinctly SFnal central concern about our relationship to technology, and indeed has already included one classic piece of SF furniture – advanced tech we don’t yet possess (in this case an algorithm that can recognize a person from the way they use their computer). Prima Facie, there’s more than enough SF content in Alif to warrant its inclusion. Sadly, it seems the Djinn are getting in the way, but they shouldn’t.

As I’ve said, genres are versatile. The potato waffles of the conceptual world, they’re quick, convenient and full of holes. Of all of the many uses of them, con-convening, subculture-spawning, and yes, award nominating, there’s probably only one where it might make sense to think of them as mutually exclusive, and that’s book shelving. Yes, that noble and vital art. After all, one physical book can’t very well be in two places at once, can it? (Unless you had two copies, but that’s outrageously radical thinking.) But the even the Clarke judges seem not to have any problem including books that aren’t shelved under SF in bookstores in the award, as both Angelmaker and The Dog Stars are sold as general lit. Odd that.

I’m not saying the Clarke list is a bad list, I’ve seen good cases made for every book on there. What I do think is that it would make much more sense, when selecting eligibility for an SF award, to judge the books on the presence of SF, rather than the absence of Fantasy, YA tropes or whatever other genre markers you might like to flag up. It would still be an SF award, in spirit as well as name, and you might even get a more diverse shortlist*. Just an idea.

*Or at the very least, you’d get rid of the ‘all the women write fantasy’ excuse, and force the conversation into different, possibly more uncomfortable, but probably more productive territory.

 

UPDATE:

One thing to be clear on, I don’t know the judges’ reasons for choosing or not choosing individual titles yet. As far as I know, neither does anyone but the judges themselves. It’s entirely possible that all of the titles Ms Williams appeared to dismiss as ‘technically fantasy’ lacked any SF content at all, ans as such weren’t elligible and that Alif and titles like it just weren’t in that bracket, and were considered and passed over for other reasons. I still think the language around the debate serves to reinforce a mutual exclusivity that doesn’t exist though.

Always should be something you really love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Saturday at the SF Weekender I had a delightful chat with a very lovely lady who asked if The City’s Son was a ‘boy book’ because she was looking for something her son could read. So, I figured I’d jot down a few thoughts on the whole “boy book vs girl book thing”.

None of these ideas are original to me. I’ve seen them in various places around the interweb, and very eloquently put. I’m summarizing here because if you stand somewhere on a political issue then it’s good practice to let people know where,  and because I’ve started thinking about this in a broader context around technology and politics and thought it was interesting.

So here’s the proposition: there are sorts of books that are/should be of interest to girls and sorts that are should/be of interest to boys and these are mutually exclusive categories, and the way to get boys to read more is to print more of the former. This idea is a) divisive b)sexist, c) exclusionary d) counterproductive and e) incredibly persistent. I.e. It’s toxic.

It’s divisive because it creates and reinforces an idea that we want girls and boys to be interested in different things, to do different things and therefore to be different things. And what’s more, to lack the basic empathy to be interested enough in an other gender to want to read book about them.

It’s sexist because the content that we tend to put into books (and other media) for either gender tends to reinforce the gendered power imbalance we have.  All too often, girls learn that they ought to be fulfilled by making house and having babies, while boys learn that they need to become comfortable with domination and violence. This is both toxic in its own right, and in the message it sends to those readers (and watchers and players) whose instincts run counter to those norms, that there’s something wrong with them.

Its exclusionary because it frames the debate in terms of a binary that’s not a true reflection of the world. There aren’t only two genders, and not all kids are sure of their gender identity, and the question ‘is this a girl book or a boy book’ shuts those kids out and makes them invisible, when quite frankly, they’ve got more than enough shit to deal with already.

And finally, it’s counter productive because once you’ve set up a divide like this, it just eats things. It’s like a fucking sarlacc, basically, a yawning chasm that actively drags things into it. Human beings taxonomise mercilessly, especially if we feel affiliated to one of the categories  All manner of things become subject to the distinction, including sport, science and reading itself. The act of picking up a book and getting lost in the story becomes something that only a specific subset of the human race ought to do, which is both bonkers and ironic if your aim is to get people reading.

Like I said, none of this is new, but all of it is, I think, true.

Here’s the broader context I was talking about: Nick Harkaway, in his book The Blind Giant, tells us ‘We have to code the change we want to see in the world.’ In a world increasingly conditioned by technology, we have to consciously and actively choose the technology that will make it easier for the world to become the way we want it to be.  For some people that means actually designing it, for everyone else that means buying it, because in a Capitalist society, paying=voting.  Nick applies this insight to various internet technologies, including amazon’s ability to yank books off your kindle without your permission and I think he’s absolutely right, but it’s not a new phenomenon.

‘Code the change you want to see in the world’ has always been good advice. It’s easy to forget when you’re talking about things that have been around for millennia, but language and books are both technologies, mature, yes, but still evolving through their use. They’re tools we created to shape the world in a certain way, and as we choose the tools we want for the future, we have to think about the future we want.  The phrases ‘boy book’ and ‘girl book’? Not tools on my list.

I, along with everyone else I know, would love a future where boys read as much as girls do. But more than that, I want a future where boys have enough basic human empathy that they can relate to Lizzy Bennet or Katniss Everdeen as a human being like them, rather than a ‘girl’ who’s nothing like them. Because if they can’t do that with a character in a book, why should we assume they’ll do it with the real thing? Anyone who’s seen any recent statistics on domestic violence think that’s not important?

(In the reverse scenario, Girls are supposed to be rather better at empathising with boy characters, a couple thousand years of masculine normativity doing what it does.)

I, along with everyone else I know, want to live in a world where any kid has the entire field of human endeavour open to them, because that’s what equality means: not that all girls and boys need to be the same, but that their differences are an expression of their individuality rather than defined by what society thinks the bits they were born with ought to mean.

If that’s the future we want, then we have to code it. We have to choose the tools, the books and the words.

Spectacular! Tentacular! There are no words in the vernacular…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The City’s Son has been nominated for a Kitschie! The Golden Tentacle for the most intelligent, entertaining and progressive debut novel of the year to be precise.

Clearly, this is now the time for me to subtly, but viciously smear my competition for the award, thereby paving my way to victory and total world tentacle domination.

Right, so… what can I say?

vN by Madeleine Ashby is a dazzlingly ambitious and tightly woven story about a sentient robot born into a mixed robot/human family, a fantastic adventure story that carries a sly

philosophical payload about power and privilege, gender and race.

Tricky one to slam,  that.  Okay, I’ll move on to the next…

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan is a gritty and compelling tale of a fierce, whip smart girl sent to a chronic youth offenders institution built in the Benthamite mode. It excels in characterisation and narrative voice, and is tough and calm, electrifying and intent.

Hmmm. What about the Dragon one?

Seraphina by Rachel Hartmann is a complex, intrigue-laden YA fantasy set in a world where dragons and humans coexist and an assistant to the court composer hides a secret that could see her ostracized from society. Her voice is by turns pedantic, lonely, scared, drily funny and fierce and sets the novel head and talons above other dragon books.

Grrr… Okay, one more go:

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, is a World Fantasy Award nominated… (this isn’t going to go well either, is it?) … tale inspired by Senegalese folklore, about a master cook, djombi spirits and a stick that can control the forces of chaos, that’s equal parts funny, opinionated and wise, and possessed of puckish, irrepressible energy.

Bugger.

Well then, I guess all I can say is it’s a phenomenal shortlist, and I’m chuffed as hell to be part of it. Now to look for a tentacle tie….

Spectacular! Tentacular! There are no words in the venacular…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The City’s Son has been nominated for a Kitschie! The Golden Tentacle for the most intelligent, entertaining and progressive debut novel of the year to be precise.

Clearly, this is now the time for me to subtly, but viciously smear my competition for the award, thereby paving my way to victory and total world tentacle domination.

Right, so… what can I say?

vN by Madeleine Ashby is a dazzlingly ambitious and tightly woven story about a sentient robot born into a mixed robot/human family, a fantastic adventure story that carries a sly

philosophical payload about power and privilege, gender and race.

Tricky one to slam,  that.  Okay, I’ll move on to the next…

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan is a gritty and compelling tale of a fierce, whip smart girl sent to a chronic youth offenders institution built in the Benthamite mode. It excels in characterisation and narrative voice, and is tough and calm, electrifying and intent.

Hmmm. What about the Dragon one?

Seraphina by Rachel Hartmann is a complex, intrigue-laden YA fantasy set in a world where dragons and humans coexist and an assistant to the court composer hides a secret that could see her ostracized from society. Her voice is by turns pedantic, lonely, scared, drily funny and fierce and sets the novel head and talons above other dragon books.

Grrr… Okay, one more go:

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, is a World Fantasy Award nominated… (this isn’t going to go well either, is it?) … tale inspired by Senegalese folklore, about a master cook, djombi spirits and a stick that can control the forces of chaos, that’s equal parts funny, opinionated and wise, and possessed of puckish, irrepressible energy.

Bugger.

Well then, I guess all I can say is it’s a phenomenal shortlist, and I’m chuffed as hell to be part of it. Now to look for a tentacle tie….

Eventing! (no, not the kind with Horses)

A bit short notice on this one – I’ve been manic finishing off The Glass Republic and have been, as our Gallic cousins would say le rubbish at posting about it, but…

I am really excited that I’m going to be at Foyles tomorrow at 6pm with the elegant Mark Charan Newton (author of The Legends of The Red Sun Series) and the enigmatic Kate Griffin (author of the Matthew Swift books and about a bajillion others under her real name) to talk about Fantasy and cities, a topic which is, as you know, near and dear to my heart.

It’s free! But you need a ticket, and you can get it here:

http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Events...

In addition to their elegance and enigmatism, Mark and Kate are both exceedingly eloquent, so it should be awesome. We might even get time to talk about Calvino’s INVISIBLE CITIES which is pretty much the most awesome book on narrative and the urban  ever.