Fiction To Nonfiction: Stephen Palmer visits the Guest Blog to talk about taking his writing in a new direction

Stephen Palmer returns to the Guest B... Second Volumes – Perils, Pleasures an...

Fiction To Nonfiction: Stephen Palmer visits the Guest Blog to talk about taking his writing in a new direction

Moving from fiction to nonfiction was a move I hadn’t expected to make.

The rate of change in the publishing scene is accelerating, with trad publishers becoming ever more risk averse, celebrities colonising our world, while authors, funnily enough, don’t get to colonise theirs, and that level playing field created by the rise of self-publishing in the digital world now so immense nobody can hear what anybody else is saying. Our cultural world is saturated with novels.

I felt depressed and disillusioned when I faced the prospect of not having a publisher for my SF and Steampunk novels. Me and Keith had a fabulous trip. But chance, more chance, imagination, and the fact that I’m nothing if not an author demanded a response once those melancholic feelings faded. That response was I Am Taurus.

Chance? A random encounter with a book by science author Jo Marchant, in which I learned for the first time about Bull No. 18 in Lascaux. More chance? The long, hot summer of 2022, and my summer break. Imagination? Putting together the inspiration I found on the first page of Marchant’s book with stuff already floating around my mind, stuff accumulated over decades of reading around prehistory and anthropology. And I just am an author…. like so many writers of prose, it’s in my blood.

What I hadn’t appreciated until later was that the brief book I’d penned was still storytelling. I’d imagined that narrative nonfiction was somehow different from fiction, that the latter was storytelling and the former facts. Now, facts interest me because the world interests me, but nobody can work with facts alone. We human beings live culturally and socially via stories. I realised, as I edited and honed my prose, that I had told a story, albeit one stretched over nineteen thousand years. It was no work of fiction, except perhaps that ten percent of embellishment and speculation, yet it was telling a proper story.

I knew then that I had remained a storyteller. It was just that I was working in a different mode. That realisation gave me hope, that people might support my new work by publishing or buying it, that I was not mortally wounded by losing my fiction base, and that there was a new path leading forwards which I could follow.

I’ve often said in workshops or handing out advice in other spheres that the difference between an author and a writer is that the former never gives up. You have to have superhuman powers of persistence in this business. You have to knock on every door and follow up every single lead. It’s exhausting, but it’s critical to success.

And my new path has forked already. A chance post on Facebook led me to a certain Mr Burrows, and then the opportunity to write a book on punk rock. So I’m going to be relating another amazing story, using all the powers of creativity at my disposal. This is another narrative nonfiction tale close to my heart. And telling this story has been enormous fun so far. Moreover, the publisher is a good, established one, and they’re going to pay me money.

Take that, depression! Feck off, disillusionment!

Stephen Palmer

Publisher’s Blurb for I Am Taurus (23.2.2024)The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago – a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even the most modern of rituals – bullfighting in Spain – is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.

Stephen Palmer is the author of twenty genre works: Memory Seed (Orbit 1996), Glass (Orbit 1997), Flowercrash (Wildside 2002), Muezzinland (Wildside 2003), Hallucinating (Wildside 2004) and The Rat And The Serpent (Prime Books 2005). In 2010 PS Publishing published the far-future Urbis Morpheos. In 2014 Infinity Plus Books published his surreal slipstream steampunk novel Hairy London, and in 2015 his Beautiful Intelligence and short novel No Grave For A Fox. In 2016, Infinity Plus published his alternate-world steampunk Factory Girl trilogy; The Girl With Two Souls / The Girl With One Friend / The Girl With No Soul, with another alternate historical work, Tommy Catkins, out in summer 2018. In 2019 IP published a return to themes of AI, The Autist. Following the relaunch of the Factory Girl trilogy later in 2019 with new Tom Brown covers, IP published a fourth work in the same world, The Conscientious Objector. Woodland Revolution, a mythic prose-poem, came out in 2020. At the end of 2021 his steampunk Conjuror Girl trilogy was published. His short stories have been published by Wildside Press, Spectrum SF, Newcon Press, Infinity Plus, Mutation Press, Eibonvale Press, Solaris, TFQ, Unspoken Water, Doghorn Publishing, Kraxon, Tickety Boo Press, The Manchester Speculative Fiction Group, Boo Books, Wayward Plants, Woodbridge Press and PS Publishing. In 2019, Newcon Press published a collection of short stories, Tales From The Spired Inn, set in the world of Memory Seed. His first non-fiction book on Tangerine Dream came out in 2021.