On Hard SF

A couple of things got me thinking recently about the distinction between 'hard' sf and everything else, particularly after finishing reading an anthology called 'The Hard SF Renaissance', edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Put slightly crudely, a popular distinction of Hard SF is that it's based on plausible scientific ideas and conjecture, whereas everything in the fantasy box isn't. Again, this isn't a criticism, it's an observation.

When I became a published writer, I had a bit of an identity crisis. Some reviewers referred to me as a writer of 'hard sf'. How could I be, if I couldn't do an Egan and spend half a year working out the physics of my next book? In that case, did that make me a writer of fantasy, or science fantasy at the very least? After all, I had faster than light travel, worm holes, and force fields - all stuff firmly in the realm of fantasy according to those more scientifically literate.

I was therefore enormously relieved to find not one but two thoroughly clear-eyed summaries of the essential spirit of science fiction in the aforementioned anthology in the form of Peter Watts' and Ted Chiang's introductions to their own stories.

From Ted Chiang's introduction to 'Understand':

"SF needn’t have any­thing to do with sci­ence, but to the ex­tent that a work of SF re­flects sci­ence, it’s hard SF. And re­flect­ing sci­ence doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean con­sis­ten­cy with a cer­tain set of facts; more es­sen­tial­ly, it means con­sis­ten­cy with a cer­tain strat­egy for un­der­stand­ing the uni­verse. Sci­ence seeks a type of ex­pla­na­tion dif­fer­ent from those sought by art or re­li­gion, an ex­pla­na­tion where ob­jec­tive mea­sure­ment takes prece­dence over sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence. And though hard SF can take many dif­fer­ent forms, it al­ways de­scribes peo­ple look­ing for or work­ing with that type of ex­pla­na­tion.”

The second quote is from Peter Watts' introduction to one of two stories he has in the anthology:

"... hard SF is of­ten dis­tin­guished from its soft­er, in­fe­ri­or cousins by virtue of ad­her­ence to rig­or­ous — or at least, plau­si­ble — sci­ence. Plau­si­ble, is it? Okay, then: Good­bye Niv­en, good­bye Her­bert and Vinge. Be­gone with your genes that code for luck, your space­ships pi­lot­ed by psy­chics, and your galac­tic Slow Zones. Good­bye Brin: A Ph.D. should’ve known bet­ter than to re­sort to ftl. You’re not plau­si­ble enough for this sand­box.

But of course I’m at­tack­ing a straw man here — be­cause as we all know, it’s not the math that counts, it’s the at­ti­tude. (...) we may not have the blueprints for a warp en­gine handy, but you’d bet­ter be­lieve that our fu­ture tech­nolo­gies have sprung from the same em­pir­ical sci­ence that gave us Teflon and chemother­apy. Our tales abide by the spir­it of sci­ence, if not the let­ter."

Our tales abide by the spirit of science, if not the letter. How great is that? There's more - a lot more - Watts has to say, but I've taken a fat enough quote out of the book as it is. For my tastes, these two arguments represent what I believe is the best analysis yet both of what sf is and what it's for. Does that mean I'm a 'hard sf' writer? I suspect not, at least certainly not compared to those authors who have the relative advantage of a working background in the sciences. But then am I a writer of science fiction, or technological fantasy? Given the above arguments, I think it's safe to say I do indeed write sf.

And it gives me a much more certain sense of what it is I do, and why I do it.

xkcd uncovers the truth

Ennui

This week's been very, very meh. Most of the time I'm not particularly affected by writing ennui, but when it hits, it hits hard. Every word, sentence and paragraph just feels dull, hackneyed and flat. I stare at the screen and wonder if my ibook really deserves to be punished by one more word being punched into the word processor.

It's a feeling that always passes, but not without hanging around for a couple of days first. One way I get over it is by reminding myself that I actually get paid to write, and paid well enough that right now I don't need to find a day job, and that if I wandered into a convention and whined like I've been doing in the previous couple of sentences I'd probably be torn asunder by rabid unpublished writers before having my half-gnawed bones tossed to the dogs. So yes, it's dumb. Still.

Some things I've noticed in the Holy Crap! Did you know box recently ...

Holy Crap! Frederick Pohl has a blog?!? How cool is that?

Holy Crap! Phil Dick's widow has gone and written The Owl in Daylight, a Dick book that only ever existed in outline form and in vague details mentioned in interviews shortly before his death. It's on sale at Amazon.com as a self-published work. And ... it's really, really terrible, if just the first few pages I previewed are anything to go by.

Well, okay, I think it's fair to say that trying to write the last novel of not only your long-dead husband but one of the genre's most highly respected authors would squeeze pretty much every other contender out of the Big Box of Really Bad Ideas, and the preview does rather, I'm afraid, confirm it. I do seem to recall reading Dick discussing 'The Owl in Daylight' in, I think, SF Eye, a couple of geological periods ago. If you can find that interview, it's very worth checking out.

And finally.

Holy Crap! Watchmen is almost out! And Alan Moore is presumably getting ready to climb inside a specially made coffin mounted on a motor-driven lathe set to fast spin (is that too obscure?)

Slush piles

For many years before I was first published, I frequently encountered naysayers who'd get a kick out of shaking their heads and chuckling at my naive desire to sell a book. "Publishers and agents get hundreds of manuscripts sent to them every single week," they'd tell me. "The chances of even getting noticed are just about bleedin' zero. Save yourself the trouble, it's a fool's game."

This is at least partly true. Publishers and agents do get hundreds of submissions every week. Outlines and queries of all kinds. First chapters of novels, complete manuscripts, synopses for six-part epics, you name it. What remained as yet unknown to either myself or the naysayers was that the majority of this unending deluge of submissions was written by people who'd have trouble remembering their own names, let alone how to spell them.

I had my first glimmer of this when I became a member of a writing workshop at the start of the Nineties, a government-sponsored scheme for the unemployed (you'd be surprised how many people in British sf wound up in schemes like that, including a few authors I know). One chap in particular liked to draw pictures of puppy dogs and sunshine in crayon on every page of his manuscripts before sending them out. I asked him why, and he said it was because it would make his story really stand out. Jeez. Another guy used to type up angry, abusive letters and send them to the agents and editors who'd just rejected his stuff. I remember him well, because he was angry and abusive to just about anyone he encountered in the workshop as well.

I began to suspect that perhaps much of that insurmountable mountain of slush I'd heard about might not be so insurmountable after all.

Rather more recently, Harper Collins set up a website called Authonomy.com, which allows anyone to upload unsolicited manuscripts and then read the submissions of others, using a scoring system to mark out the ones they liked. It was, in effect, the slush pile reading the slush pile. Those getting the highest consistent scores got the attention of a real life editor.

Which all sounds fine and dandy, except I signed up just to take a look at some of the submissions that had been posted to the site, reasoning that it was pretty much the only way to experience a genuine slush pile without actually stepping into an agent or editor's office. I wanted to see exactly what I was up against when I was shopping my first novel around more than ten years ago.

Anyone with even a smidgen of writing ability who's convinced themselves they'll drown in a sea of slush and never be noticed will come away from authonomy.com imbued with a warm, fuzzy glow, since most of the time you only need to look at the first paragraph of pretty much anything uploaded there to understand why a lot of novels are rejected on the basis of that paragraph alone. Or the first word. Or even the first crayon drawing of happy bunnies and sunshine to make the editor/agent feel good.

This is not to say, of course, that the road to publication merely means avoiding the use of crayons or learning to spell your own name. There's a lot more than that, like reading lots and lots of books, or carefully crafting your plot and your words, and all the other stuff that goes in the box marked 'hard work'. But even so, it's worth remembering a dozen monkeys with typewriters have a serious chance at coming up with something more entertaining than about three quarters of what's to be found in the average slush pile. And if you don't believe me, check out this post on The Swivet, which got me thinking about the subject of this blog.

Author bio's

It's long been the case that authors tend to have dodgy jobs on the road to professional publication. It used to be that writers would compete on a friendly level to come up with the most lunatic possible list of prior occupations with which to fill the author's biographical notes on the inside flap of their books, just below the photo of them looking far more dashing and handsome than they are in real life; the trick being, they had to be real jobs, part of the inevitable graft and grind to be endured before scoring that first publishing deal.

A friend of mine was rather proud of having briefly worked while a student at a psychic hot-line business where he was employed to read the tarot to old ladies over the phone (they train you over a weekend), the trick being - of course - to keep them on the phone for as long as possible. Despite its slightly dodgy moral aspect, he rightly believed it was the perfect job to put in an author biography along with ferret salesman, turkey semen extractor and other thankless occupations that no doubt help prevent our civilisation from collapsing into ruin.

My own author bio has been really boring for a while. "Gary Gibson lives and writes in Glasgow and works as a graphic designer". I couldn't think of anything interesting until I really tried earlier today and sent it off to my editor to see if she liked it. The jobs aren't unusual, but the people I worked for ... that's another matter. Here it is:

'Prior to becoming a professional writer, Gary Gibson worked for an environmental agency, but left shortly after members of staff attempted to levitate a local bridge as a protest against road traffic.

Following this, he worked as a graphic designer for a printing firm that turned out to be run by a gang of convicted forgers, hastening his departure: and then for a small publishing company otherwise notable only for producing a Freddie Mercury impersonator well-known on the Scottish cabaret circuit. He currently resides in Taipei with his wife, where the only lunatic he has to answer to now is himself.'

All true.

Writing Life

I always wanted to write a post like this one by Alan Campbell, another Tor author and the man behind Scar Night and its sequels.

"Open word processor. Look at empty page. Write another beginning for another new book. Notice that I have 27 of these openings now. Close word processor. Answer emails. Have a ten minute game of online poker. Win 83p. Open word processor. Start all over again."

I've read some writers descriptions of their working lives - up at dawn, five mile run, bran and fruit for breakfast, work for a straight eight hours, outline a complete book by supper and then to bed for a maximum of six hours sleep before up again two hours before dawn for judo practice - and wonder if they might be, you know, exaggerating just a wee bit.

My life is a bit more like Alan's. Just a bit. I do actually write almost every single day, for at least a couple of hours. I'd love to do more, but my brain and body just won't let me. I've found I usually can't write until maybe three in the afternoon - emphasis on can't. Brain-to-fingers communication is zero until that point. Or perhaps it just takes that long for the caffeine to finally hit my system.

Rude bits

A writer for the Guardian spent some time analysing pictures of Tory leader David Cameron's bookshelves and provided a list of the titles there, along with appropriately snide comments. Charlie Stross's 'Saturn's Children' was amongst them*, which got a comment that managed to be both snide and dismissive: 'An "erotic futuristic thriller" according to Amazon. I've never heard of it. And Cameron's never read it.' But how does he know?

Otherwise, there's been a bit of a mini-storm over a book, Knife Music, by David Carnoy, which Apple chose to ban from being sold to users of the iphone for 'objectionable content'. I rather suspect the hand of a wildly overzealous non-reading Apple employeee in this. Carnoy was required to take the word 'fuck' out of the book - and he did, since it was used only a couple of times.

Just to be clear why I think this kind of censorship - and it is censorship - is a bad idea: without sweary words, we might end up reading passages like this -

Parker shot the thug once in the knee and twice in the chest.
"Darn it!" cried the thug as he collapsed to the ground, staring up at Parker. "You beastly swine!"

Or perhaps we could substitute a comedy WW2 German soldier for the thug:

"Aiee!" cried the German guard as he collapsed to the ground, staring up at Parker. "Englischer schweinhund!"

My point: censorship is carried out by authoritarian moral cowards who think we're far too simple-minded to handle the big nasty sweary words. Once one moves past the appalling hypocrisy inherent in a company who have no issue in selling an Itunes track called 'Jizz in my Pants' but don't want us to see the word 'fuck', one is left wondering what they're going to do when it comes to selling books like 'Wetlands' by Charlotte Roche, which is apparently almost entirely set in a proctology ward and features a hygiene-free and deeply promiscuous heroine. Perhaps they could next work their way through Henry Miller's back catalogue and replace every naughty word with 'zoinks!', lest our poor hearts be stilled by the shock of encountering lewdness.



*Or apparently it is, since the picture the Guardian posted is at a sufficently low resolution for me not to be able to make out any titles at all.

Thoughts on writing a very fast first draft

Generally positive. Between the 20th of October and the 10th of January I wrote 122,475 words, averaging roughly 1750 words a day, not counting thirteen days when I was otherwise restructuring what I'd already written or busy getting on with life-stuff. Some days I wrote more, several others I wrote less. It helped that I was working from a very detailed 15,000 word outline.

The advantage is it's a lot easier to remember what was going on in your head when you wrote a particular scene two weeks before as opposed to, say, two or more months before. What you end up with might be rough as hell, but it at least has the advantage of being fundamentally more cohesive than a first draft that takes six months to write. A quickly written draft allows you to be much more 'in the moment' of the story.

Even so, I stopped short of writing the penultimate scene in the first draft, since by the time I got there I knew I wanted to make very fundamental changes to certain major characters, and those changes would very likely be reflected in that final, as yet unwritten, scene. So I've started on the second draft. Since I'm using Scrivener, I can change the text colour according to which draft I'm writing; white (on black) for the first draft, green on black for the second. I can scan through the text I've reworked so far and see it's about 90% green and 10% white. By the time I'm on the third (yellow) draft, I'll be interested to see how much, if any, white text is left.

New Year's Eve

On the subject of stuff I liked over the past year, you can find out more of what I liked and others liked as well at fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com.

It's New Year's Eve, and about the time people back in Scotland are celebrating, I'll be fast asleep in bed, because it'll be about eight o'clock in the morning in Taipei when it's New Year in Western Europe. See you in '09.

half-price ebooks

If you're a reader of ebooks, you might be interested to know WH Smith's - a British chain of shops - are doing them all at half-price just now. That means you can pick up an ebook version of Stealing Light in epub format just now for three quid. It's drm-ed, mind. Over and out.

2008 in review

I've been a touch quiet around here, but that relative silence on the blog has translated into being just shy of the one hundred thousand mark on the third Dakota book in barely two months. This makes me happy. There's a long, long way to go, especially when it comes to revising the manuscript. I might be writing fast, but I can guarantee I'll be sweating words every day right up to the deadline in July.

I've noticed people have been doing stuff like best-of-year lists, so rather than be original and do something different I'm going to jump on the bandwagon.

Books that stood out for me this year include Cory Doctorow's brilliant Little Brother, Lewis Shiner's semi-historical novel about race in America, Black & White, and Dan Simmons' utterly superb sf/horror/historical, The Terror.

Best movie I saw was Iron Man, closely followed by In Bruges, a tale of two hitmen stuck in Belgium on a long weekend. The worst film I saw this year - and in fact, several years - was the latest Indiana Jones movie. They may be making more of them, but I won't be seeing them.

I enjoyed Batman Returns, but I spent a good third of it squinting at the screen and asking my other half, "what're they saying?" Although there were many tremendous and gripping scenes and Ledger's Joker was game-changing, some parts of the film were muddled and the sound a muddy mixture of too-loud special effects and mumbling actors.

Best gadget by far for me this year was the Sony Reader. If you don't believe me, I just can't explain it. Let's just say it makes the reading experience so desperately addictive you start jonesing when the damn thing isn't around to play with.

Music ... god knows. It gets faintly annoying when other blogs start posting about obscure indie bands out of some Brazilian favela, but the fact is I just don't buy or listen to anything anymore. The reason is very simple: I don't have the time. If I'm listening to music, I'm not doing anything else. I don't like music as background noise, because that's just so wrong. It's music. You listen to it, and you give it due attention.

And I would, if I had the time, and I don't. The only intrusion music makes on me at all these days is the stuff at somafm.com, whose 'drone zone' - mainly ambient, slightly beepy stuff heavy on the atmospheric effects - I sometimes have on in the background when I'm writing since it's more of an aural mood setting than actual music. If it starts sounding too much like actual music, it distracts me and I can't write.

Which is weird, because I bought myself a new acoustic a few months back, a small, cheap travel guitar. I used to play a hell of a lot of guitar, electric and acoustic, and there's a long, long story in that. But it's nice to keep my hand in with my Simon & Kilpatrick guitar stuck back in Scotland.

The major personal event for me this year was moving to Taiwan with my girlfriend and getting married. Some friends asked why I hadn't mentioned this fact already on the blog - we got hitched at the start of the month - and the reason is I don't see this blog so much as being about my personal life nearly so much as it's about my writing career. Blogs, after all, aren't the same as diaries. But that - along with living in Taiwan, at least for a while - was the most significant thing in my life this year.

In terms of writing, it's been my most successful year so far - onwards and upwards, as they say - with Stealing Light selling better than anything else I've had published, as well as being my first hardback publication. So all in all, a good year.

Sony Reader Six Months On

I wrote about getting a Sony Reader with an e-ink screen almost six months ago. It's a second hand 500, as opposed to the more recent 505, which is now more widespread. I bought the older, cheaper version because I wasn't sure if I would still be using it after six months. And it's only after that amount of time you can really be sure a device has really made that much difference to your life. There didn't seem to be much point in buying something that might wind up lost in a drawer by the time six months rolled around. So this entry is the six-months-later entry: did the machine make a difference to my life?

The answer is a very vigorous thumbs-up. I love the bloody thing, despite its many faults. God knows there are enough of them; it crashed from time to time, necessitating sticking a pin in the back to get it to laboriously reboot. Changing pages can occasionally also be a bit slow. It doesn't come near the stated 7000-pages-before-needing-a-recharge stated in all of Sony's advertising. And that's just the hardware. There are endless problems to do with file formats - .lit, .mobi, .epub, and .on and .on and .on. Books sold on ebook sites can frequently be outrageously priced compared to the dead tree version (the fault of the publisher, not the retailer). Many of them are DRM-ed, meaning software has been used to 'secure' the book so it can only be read on one device. Which in the case of the Sony Reader rather limited your options, since until limited upgrades were made available earlier this year, you were pretty much stuck with books sold through their own site with its woefully limited selection.

Because of this, I've had to download software that allows me to 'crack' books I've legally bought before I can even read them. I've worked my way through a nightmarish morass of incompatibilities, software issues, hardware issues ... oh,I could go on and on ... and there are enough problems, indeed, to send most sane human beings running screaming back to their tactile, bound hardbacks and paperbacks that never need to be recharged and are never going to prevent you from reading them because, well, you might be a software pirate, mightn't you?

And yet, it's still the greatest thing. The words are an absolute delight on the screen. It's remarkably like reading words on paper. The text is clear and sharp. The machine is stunningly sleek and portable. And my reading has gone through the roof; I've read more books in the past six months than I'm usually likely to get through in a couple of years, if that. I only realised after purchasing the device that many of my purchasing decisions previously depended on whether I had anywhere to put the books I bought, and whether I would need to buy more and more shelves to hold them.

That's no longer an issue, and neither is the number of books I've accrued since coming to Taiwan when it comes to my future return to Scotland, either. If I'd bought the dead tree editions, I'd have needed an extra (large) suitcase to carry them home. I read waiting in restaurants, standing in trains, sitting in waiting rooms; the Reader fits perfectly in my jacket pocket, and I can whip it out in a moment and start off where I'd last left in seconds. In fact, I now find it distinctly hard to go back to reading paper books. They seem large, and unwieldy, and difficult to hold. I am, in short, a convert.

I've made a point of being the first to describe the many discouraging issues concerning the technology. I suspect machines like this are really for the hardcore reader like myself; critics are right to point out these are not devices for the kind of people who might read one or two books in a year while on holiday. But for people who like to read a lot, they're an absolute godsend. More recent devices manufactured by other firms - such as the Cybook and Bebook - have solved certain difficulties concerning battery life and file compatibility, and all the newer machines apparently have much greater contrast and legibility. It's clear the technology is still evolving, and is far from reaching a plateau. There are many issues - not all positive - to consider in the future; the way in which many of these devices are effectively hobbled both by publisher and manufacturers, for one. But for the moment, for this reader here, I can safely say I've renewed my addiction to reading, and you can prise my ebook reader from my cold, dead hands, and not a moment before.