Ben Aaronovitch's Blog, page 32

Upcoming Events

After five minutes off the relentless round of self-publicity that is the lot of the modern author continues. Although this month I seem to be a supporting act for much of it.
Monday 10th September: Magic In The Court (1830-2100)
Goldsboro Books will be celebrating a visit by Deborah Harkness (Shadow of Night) and I shall be there along with my mate Suzanne McLeod for free drinks, canapés and gossip.
Goldsboro Books 23 -25 Cecil Court London WC2N 4EZ
Details here.

Wednesday 12th September: Chat with Sara Sheriden (1830-2000) Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road are hosting a chat between me and author Sara Sheridan where we shall be discussing writerly type concerns and taking questions from the audience.
Blackwell's100 Charing Cross Road
London
WC2H 0JG

Email Amelia to reserve a space (they like to know how many people are coming).  

En Francaise!

Moon Over Soho is out in French on August the 28th under the title of Magie Noire A Soho which I'm going to assume translates as Black Magic In Soho.
More details as I get them.

A Quick Note

To everybody trying to contact me via www.the-folly.com - I'm afraid that while the email forwarder diligently delivers your messages to me I'm having technical problems replying the same way. I'll let you know when it's fixed.

A Clarification....

A question I keep getting asked is how many Peter Grant books are there going to be and whether it is a trilogy, a quadrology or whatever. For clarity I'm going to answer this in two ways...
1) The Peter Grant books should be thought of as an ongoing series of detective novels in the manner of Ian Rankin, P.D. James or Ed McBain's 87th Precinct. There are some elements and story lines that carry over and develop from book to book but it is not a trilogy in the fat fantasy series sense.
2) Currently I am working on book 4 which should be completed before Christmas and published, probably, in the spring. So far Gollancz (Orion) have commissioned me to further write 5 and 6.
Assuming that people continue to buy the books I plan to keep writing them until I run out of ideas or I can afford a yacht(1). I plan to write some non Peter Grant books at some point but I'm having far to much fun with the Folly at the moment to quit.
(1) And I'm not talking about some dinky dinghy with sails I'm talking about a fuck-off oligarch, James Bond villain yacht here.

Where Scalzi Leads I Shall Follow...

I blame John Sclazi for this irresistible idea. Following his example - here are some choice comments from one star reviews I got for Midnight Riot/Rivers of London. Just so we're clear; I'm posting them as an act of bravado, to prove that no matter how well received your work is somebody, somewhere will not like it and because it does an author good to eat a bit of humble pie.
This should go without saying but, just in case it doesn't, this should in no way be construed as an incitement for others to attack the reviewer - do not do this.
"This is easily the worst book I have read for a while. A long while. I suppose it's meant to be Harry Potter for grown ups but I just didn't find it in any way shape or form plausible or entertaining."
"I really tried to like this book. I thought it would be more engaging but I just couldn't get into it. This is the first book in a long while that I stopped reading before it was finished."
"I adored the premise of this book & it started off fine but it just got harder & harder to plow through until I gave up & just skimmed the last 40 pages. It was just depressing that the character discovers magic is real but it's directed towards hurting people & quarreling" 
"As a Londoner, I liked the descriptions of the city, and I loved a POC in the role of the magical protagonist, but the plot's ridiculously predictable to the point of being silly. I gave up about halfway through."
"This just didn't engage me in any way. I was disappointed and only got about 3/4 of the way through."
"Did not like it."  
One-star (and otherwise negative) reviews happen. Accept them, own them, and then move on from them - John Scalzi

Painting By Numbers

Perception
Dr. Daniel Pierce, a talented but eccentric neuroscientist, is enlisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in solving some of its most complex cases. Dr. Pierce works closely with Special Agent Kate Moretti, a former student who recruited him to work with the Bureau. Also on the team are Max Lewicki, Dr. Pierce's teaching assistant and Natalie Vincent, his best friend. Now I may be doing this show a disservice but I don't think that's the way to bet. If mighty whitey turns out to be tolerant of others, polite and occasionally mistaken I may forgive the central character but this is still bolted together out of clichés.

In Germany

I am in Germany where the keys are located in different places on the keyboard than I'm used to.

I have no email here but this terminal is just accross from the hotel so I will check comments.

Coffee is verz good here and people v.friendy  if only I could stop trying to talk to them in French.

Character Songs: Nightingale

Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale"I'll protect you from the hooded claw...Keep the vampire from your door."

Whispers Under Ground - Time Out Review

I got four stars in Time Out!

At Last The Truth! We're Going To Need a Bigger Truck!

I tried being carefree but all that resulted was a list of influences in no particular order - those halcyon days are over, ORDER must be imposed.

N.K. Jemison recently asked: But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense? To which the answer, of course, is that the magic works the way that the magic needs to work to further the aims of your story. Genre is a description not a prescription and in the final analysis the trappings of a story are not what sets the good stuff apart from the bad.

 In Rivers of London I decided that while I understood the way magic worked, I am the creator after all, the practitioners of magic both Newtonian and natural, had to work within an incomplete and, in some cases, erroneous theoretical base. 
It's still possible to achieve great things with an erroneous theory. Bazalgette's sewer system in London was built on the understanding that bad smells caused disease but still had the required effect of ridding the city of cholera. And bad smells as well.
But these ideas didn't just pop into my head like a slightly irritating know-it-all prophecy or the warrior in Jet and Gold they were influenced by the work of the giants(1) that came before me.
Making Magic WorkAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke(2)
The Incomplete Enchanter L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt 's 1941 book of magic and dimension hopping was the first time I was exposed to the idea that magic might be determined by the underlying rules of the universe.

In the first novella 'The Roaring Trumpet' our hero, transported to a world of Nordic myth, confidently steps forward to slay a dragon with his pistol only to find that it doesn't work. There's nothing mechanically wrong with his gun it's just that in this particular universe the chemical reactions that facilitate firearms don't work.

When you're 11 years old this is heady stuff but more importantly it teaches you to think critically about how magic will fit into your world. 

A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin once said in an interview that she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) because she'd always wondered where all the wizards that populated fantasy actually learnt their magic. The answer is the school on Roke which is, as far as I know, the first wizarding school in fiction.
As Jemison points out in her blog that the magic they learn at Roke is more than memorising the true names of things and that being both conditional and situational was much more an art than a science. And while it's explicit that 'rules change in the reaches' I always got the impression that Ursula knew why(3).
Ars Magica It's been just under thirty years since I played an RPG in earnest and yet I still have several shelves full of them. I can claim a certain utilitarian value for things like the GURPS historical source books and Call of Cthulhu supplements and some of them are beautiful artefacts just in themselves.

But the truth is that you'd be hard pressed to find a more concentrated form of ideas anywhere else. For writers of a certain bent they are the crack cocaine of research materials. You know it might be bad for you but the hit is so...so... fast.

It was Ars Magica's use of Latin words to describe the building blocks of Hermetic magic was a direct inspiration for the formae Nightingale teaches Peter in Rivers of London. This set me thinking about what exactly is it you are doing in your brain when you speak a magic spell and the idea that the words were abstract labels, like musical notes, whose purpose was to regulate the way you formed the shapes in your mind.

The Science of Discworld II
The founding of the Folly and the codification of magic by Isaac Newton owes itself to a throwaway remark in this book. In it they discuss Newton's interest in religious philosophy and alchemy, which the writers make clear is a waste of Newton's time, one of them, in the footnote, does point out that if anyone in the history of science was going to discover the principles of magic it was Isaac Newton.

A light-bulb went off in my head and voila. The moral is be careful what you say in your footnotes lest some jobbing writer rebuild his entire career on the basis for your throwaway remark.
Making Magic Wild     Madouc performed a prim curtsey, and Shimrod bowed. ‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I do not meet princesses every day!’
      Madouc gave a rueful grimace. ‘I had rather be a magician, and see through walls. Is it difficult to learn?’
       ‘Quite difficult, but much depends upon the student. I have tried to teach Dhrun a sleight or two, but with only fair success.’
    ‘My mind is not flexible,’ said Dhrun. ‘I cannot think so many thoughts at once.’
     'That is the way of it, more often than not, and luckily so,’ said Shimrod. ‘Otherwise, everyone would be a magician and the world would be an extraordinary place.’
       Madouc considered. ‘Sometimes I think as many as seventeen thoughts all together.’
Lyonesse III: MadoucMagic in Jack Vance's fantasy has always been exotic, extraordinary and deliberately obtuse. Vance makes it clear that magic has rules, lots and lots of rules, it's just that they are as vague, contrary and fantastical as the strange beings that practise it. 
As with much else in  a Vance novel success in magic is as much a question of negotiation and verbal dexterity as it is adherence to formulas. From Vance I not only took the notion that the magic of the genius loci, and others, was wilder and more fabulous than the structured magic of the newtonians but also a looseness of definition to avoid that 'got it out of the monster manual' feel.
The Lord of the Rings By some Oxford professor whose name escapes me(4). The magic in Tolkien's work is subtle and often works at an intangible, spiritual level. As when the Black Riders are driven into the river by Glorfindel(5) despite there being no physical battle as such or the lack of distinction by the elves between 'craft' and 'magic'. 
I drew upon both aspects for Rivers of London where craft lies at the heart of human magic and the power of the Rivers is often intangible and difficult to distinguish from the natural world.
Before anyone asks I have no intention of explaining that in any more detail - spoilers. Let's just say that human agency and activity is a key part of the way magic is produced.
Quatermass and the Pit By Nigel Kneale. Some of you are no doubt saying - 'But Ben, surely this is science fiction not fantasy?' Which is what makes it interesting. In this story of man's discovery that his evolution has been shaped by aliens some three million years before the release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus   Kneale artfully weaves together science and folklore in a way far beyond that of your purveyor of tired second hand tropes(6).
At one point the legend of the wild hunt is explicitly linked to the culls of ancient Mars and then to the increasing mob violence of an overpopulated contemporary Earth. In this instance science (or rather biology) becomes the instigator of the wild magic itself.
Once again this blog has got too long and will be continued in next weeks instalment - Now At Last! I Can't Believe I Don't Get A Bulk Discount.

(1) They weren't all giants. The best that could be said of some of them was that they were dwarves with step ladders but they tried hard and that's the main thing.
(2) The corollary; that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, was coined independently by me in 1988 for the Doctor Who story Battlefield - only it got cut from the broadcast version and I can't find my scripts. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
(3) In fiction it is entirely sufficient for an author to give an impression that they know what  what they're doing regardless of of whether they do or not - the exact opposite of Engineering. 
(4) Definitely not the one who wrote the Narnia books though. 
(5) I can't believe his name was preprogrammed into my factory standard spell checker. 
(6) However beautiful it looks.