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Holy shit, that was an intense couple of weeks; up until Sunday night I was pretty much getting up in the morning, eating breakfast, then sitting down to write and - bar a couple of breaks here and there - finishing at ten in the evening. Not every day, mind, but enough of them to be notable, but as a result of which a finished draft of The Thousand Emperors is off to my agent and my publisher. The official deadline was July 1st, but I usually overshoot that by a couple of weeks. This time, I had to complete a draft faster than I ever had before.

It's a loose sequel to Final Days - which is out in just a couple of weeks in hardback - loose as in, I feel reasonably confident you could read it without having had to have read the previous volume. There are only a very few continuing characters, and the roles they play in 1kE have little relationship to their roles in Final Days.

At some point, I'll try and put together a reader-friendly synopsis of the story and post it here. Next book up is what I think will be called A River Across the Sky. It's set in the same Shoal universe as the three Dakota Merrick books, but is not related to those three volumes.

Draft finished

That's the final-prior-to-emailing-to-agent-and-publisher draft of Thousand Emperors finished. 114,000 words, started 25th October 2010 (after three months of planning and outlining) and finished five minutes ago on 10th July 2011 at about half past ten in the evening.

Of course, there'll be more editing later, with editorial comments, proofreading, etc etc.

There's less than a month to go before Final Days, my sixth novel, comes out. Thousand Emperors is a loose sequel to it. In a couple of months time I'll be starting the next book, which (unlike either Final Days or Thousand Emperors [or 1kE as I sometimes refer to it] is set in the same Shoal universe as my last three books.

Everything, Everywhere

...and just a few days after I wrote a blog piece suggesting that the future of information consisted of Everything, All of the Time, I get a text from my mobile operator (Orange), telling me they've combined with T-Mobile to become...'Everything Everywhere'. Is that a frisson of futureshock rushing through me like a chill wind, or have I just been drinking too much coffee again?

Me, Mamatas and Duncan

I had a pleasant surprise last week by unexpectedly finding myself lunching in Glasgow's West End in the company of Hal Duncan and Nick Mamatas. Mamatas is the author of, amongst others, 'Starve Better', an excellent book on, essentially, surviving as a writer, particularly when faced with economic difficulties (by a curious happenstance, I'd given it a positive review on Amazon UK just the week before, while having absolutely no idea I'd find myself having lunch with the guy within a few days). He's a man with a sometimes fearsome online reputation, most often expressed through his blog, when he's not the editor for Haikasoru books. In short, it was a lot of fun; Nick was over with his Scottish-born partner Olivia for a family wedding. Typically, given their guide was Hal, they washed up at Stravaigin's in the West End. Hal talked about the bizarre architectural similarities between Glasgow and parts of New York; I urged them to visit the city's enormous graveyard, the Necropolis (Mamatas: 'it's like you know me').

At some point, the conversation steered towards Asian theme restaurants, which I thought I'd discussed before on this blog but, to my consternation, find I haven't. They range from the cute to the mindboggling and, sometimes, to depths greater than you can possibly imagine. I've seen a restaurant designed to look like the inside of a jet, complete with waiting staff dressed as airline attendants. But I've also seen a restaurant called Modern Toilet, which I'm not even going to describe to you because, really, I prefer not to think about it (but if you can bear the horror, there's a piece about it here). I also told Nick about the infamous Nazi death-camp themed restaurant that briefly opened in Taipei several years ago, and was quickly shut down.

I could have sworn I'd already written about this place, but a search through my blog entries reveals this is not apparently the case. But before you start thinking Taiwan is a hotbed of Fourth Reich activity, consider this excerpt from the ten-year old BBC article I linked to above:

The restaurant's manager, Stone Cheng, told Associated Press that the owners and designers had spent months planning the interior.

The theme was not intended to offend customers, or show support for the Holocaust, he said.

"Taiwanese just aren't that aware of this history and aren't as sensitive about it as foreigners are."

 Most Taiwanese can describe in detail the atrocities committed by Japanese troops who controlled Taiwan and parts of China during World War II. But many are unclear about what happened on the other side of the world.

 To say that the Taiwanese, by and large, continue to be 'unaware' of history outside of Asia is putting it mildly. I've heard stories - possibly apocryphal - that elderly Taiwanese have been known to greet German tourists with the words 'Heil Hitler' not because of their support for Nazi principles but because it's the only two words of German they know. A few years ago there was a flurry of outrage in the press when someone spotted Hitler dolls for sale in the Ukraine that later turned out in fact to have been manufactured in...Taiwan.

But it's not just Taiwan: it's Asia in general. Consider the case of the Japanese boy band that dressed in SS uniforms just earlier this year.

This all came to mind recently when a friend in Taiwan posted this image on Facebook:

In case you're wondering, it's on the pavement outside an Italian shoe shop in Taipei. Whoever chose it did so out of regard for what they considered its aesthetic properties, from within a sucking vacuum of ignorance regarding its historical context. To put it another way: people in Asia don't realise that Nazis still frighten the shit out of a lot of the rest of the world, and have zero awareness of the atrocities of WW2 in Europe and the years leading up to it.

Before we all get riled up about how shockingly and scandalously ignorant people in Asia are, may I first remind you:

Yes, it's our very own Prince Harry, dressed as a Nazi, back in 2005. We have our own ignorant dimwits too. And once you've gotten over Nazi-themed restaurants, ponder the existence in the West of Chairman Mao-themed restaurants. Yes, that's right, you too can scarf down rice and chicken under the glowing paternal image of a ruthless dictator whose time in power saw tens of millions of Chinese starve to death during the forced collectivisation of agriculture. So: yay for theme restaurants!

Objects of Desire

I am, like most, subject to uncontrollable lusts for certain items, most frequently gadgets. My most recent indulgence was an Orange San Francisco phone - itself a rebranded ZTE Blade, manufactured in China. It is, according to pretty much everyone I've asked, pretty much the best smartphone you can get for under a hundred quid. It's barely been out of my hands since I bought it, though I'm tempted to root it sometime soon and change networks - Orange's PAYG data allowance is paltry, and rooting would hopefully allow me to upgrade the Android operating system as well as switch networks and get rid of some of the truly foul and irredeemably buggy Orange software that currently infects it. Before the phone, it was the Kindle; and before the Kindle, it was the current generation of Macbooks.

Apart from gadgets, I have a weird thing for shoulder bags. I have a couple - a canvas green one I got from Gap years ago that's served me well, and a memory foam-lined laptop bag that's excellent. The Gap bag is getting a bit knackered now, and although I don't really need a laptop bag that much, since I rarely take my laptop out with me, the idea of getting something that combined the possible benefits of both did occur from time to time. The desire manifested into object-lust when I saw someone in the street with a bag that looked much like this one: the Pell-Mell messenger bag.

It ain't cheap, though, at least by my standards, at just over a hundred quid. But it's quality, hand-made stuff, and seems to get rave reviews from more places than just Amazon. The idea of a good, solid shoulder-bag/satchel that could last me a twenty years has a lot of appeal. I'm not completely stuck on the idea of getting a Pell-Mell, though - there might be equally good but cheaper leather shoulder bags out there worth considering. If you know of any, leave a comment.

Writing

I finished the first draft of Thousand Emperors Tuesday afternoon, and entered into a state of general collapse after that. It's a feeling I've had before - like I'd been worked over with a couple of baseball bats the week before, but for some reason didn't notice until now. The only reason I can think of why I might feel that way is that there's a certain tension generated in a process you know is going to take several months of incremental work; the tension just sort of slowly builds up and up and up, and isn't really released until you type THE END. Then I just sort of shuffle around blinking like I've been locked in a cave for five years. Given writing isn't that physically labour intensive, you wouldn't think it could have that kind of effect on me; and indeed during these times I usually find myself trying to work out how just typing for a couple hours a day could possibly have that kind of effect. But it does.

Now I've got two months or so of hardcore editing to do. I gather some people find this harder than just making stuff up, but I actually find it easier than sitting in front of a laptop trying to will two thousand words into existence day after day after day. At least, when you're revising, you already know what the story is or should be. All you're doing is rearranging words and events in a hopefully more attractive and/or interesting way. So, head down again, really, and not to re-emerge until sometime in July...when I send this off, and get started on A River Across The Sky, a new book set in the same universe as Stealing Light and its sequels (but not, itself, a direct sequel to any of those).

Taipei Mon Amour

At the moment, Taiwan is facing a new election, between the two main parties the DPP and KMT. The KMT are the old guard, who fled the Maoist revolution on the mainland, bringing with them the entire Chinese gold and foreign currency reserve. The DPP only came into existence in the mid-Eighties, as part of moves towards eventual democratisation.

To cut a very long and confusing story short, you just need to know that the KMT, despite having fled mainland China, are the party who most favour renewed cultural and economic contact with the Chinese government. The DPP are the ones who generally want an official declaration of independence from China; and despite being one of the boom economies of the Asian-Pacific, a lot of maps still show Taiwan as being part of China.

You have no idea how much this pisses off a lot of Taiwanese. Things got bad enough in the mid-Nineties that the Chinese military forces fired some 'test missiles' over Taiwan when they thought the then-DPP President was getting too cozy with Washington. Cue a major political crisis.

At the moment, the KMT are in charge again, and things are terribly cosy between President Ma and Beijing. Things, however, are not necessarily looking good for Ma in the upcoming elections, which means the DPP could wind up back in power. Which is why I find the following recent statement taken from the BBC news so weirdly entertaining:

"We don't need outsiders' help to win votes (said Sun Yang-Ming, vice president of the Cross-Strait Interflow Prospect Foundation, a government-linked think tank), but we hope they will avoid such actions as making threats or conducting military manoeuvres, including test-firing missiles."

Does make our politics look a bit bland, by comparison, doesn't it?

SF Writing Class

The Imp of the Perverse landed upon my shoulders a while back and demanded I do something I've never done before: teach a science fiction creative writing class. It had occurred to me that with five books in print so far, I was at least partly qualified to take whatever it is I do that persuades publishers to give me ridiculous sums of money and try and stuff that same knowledge into the heads of a bunch of complete strangers.

The pay is terrible, by the way, so transcendentally minuscule that, when I dropped by Strathclyde University for a chat with the woman organizing the Summer Learning Programme, she actually cringed upon describing the level of remuneration concerned, as if expecting me to leap to my feet and heap invective upon her and her shrivelled, miserly soul. She needn't have worried. Having already done my research, I was already entirely aware of the meagre compensation involved.

Which is my roundabout way of informing you that, no, I am not doing this for the money. What exactly I am doing it for is harder to define, although certainly an interview with the Canadian author, Robert J. Sawyer, served as an influence: he describes how teaching classes on sf writing in Toronto helped him better understand just what it is he does when he writes, a statement that brings to mind the old saying that one of the best ways to really understand a subject is to teach it.

Actually, there's another reason. I once took part in an evening creative writing class many years ago which was, quite simply, transcendentally awful (sorry, but it's my word for today: transcendentally). But as the years passed and I slowly evolved into a pro writer, I began to wonder if perhaps, given the opportunity, I couldn't help but do better.

Strathclyde University, in their wisdom, took my class proposals and chopped them in two, so I in fact will be teaching two courses as part of their Summer Learning Programme: Writing SF in late July, and Understanding SF in August. Each class consists of just two two-hour classes, which isn't really a great deal of time at all, so maybe I'll have to learn how to talk really, really fast. But if it goes well for me and for the University, there's the possibility of longer, more in-depth classes in the future.

So what's my Unique Selling Point, as they like to say in marketing seminars? Well, for a start, it's a class on science fiction writing run by an actual working science fiction writer. Beyond that, the aim is to take all the things I've learned while writing that I wish I'd known at the start, and cram them into the heads of people who are themselves only just starting out.

The emphasis, in the writing class, anyway, is on fiction more than it is science, since the rules are the same regardless of what genre you work in. But the science part will most certainly be there, in the form of digressions regarding worldbuilding and creating a sense of verisimilitude. The intention is to incorporate some level of workshopping, but it remains to be seen just how practical this proves to be in a class that only lasts a total of four hours.

The other class, Understanding SF, is a quick guide through the history of the genre. To some extent it's aimed more at those not entirely familiar with the genre, but I'm going to try and demonstrate why the 20th Century might not have taken the shape it did if not for the influence of science fiction.

The SF Writing Workshop lasts two weeks, starting Monday 25th July, from 6 to 8 in the evening. Understanding SF runs from Friday 12 August for two weeks, and takes place between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. Both cost £19 each, and you can book these and any other of the Summer Programme classes at www.strath.ac.uk/cllsummer. 

Everything, All of the Time

Thoughts going through my head on the home-run to finishing The Thousand Emperors: if I had it in me to write some vast, sprawling thousand-page novel taking in everything that mattered about social chance and technology in the 21st Century, it would be called Everything, All of the Time.

I'm not sure if I heard that phrase somewhere before and picked it up, but to my mind it pretty much sums up where things feel like they're going, particularly given my acquisition in the past few weeks of my first smartphone.  Such questions regarding the increasing density of available information can also be a problem in fiction, when plots are often defeated by the increasing and immediate availability of the same.

Most often plots are about what people don't know, and their subsequent search for enlightenment. It's something that occurs to me as the fatal flaw at the heart of any science fiction novel set more than thirty years from now, including my own: that given sufficient time and progress, anything anyone wants to know will be available to them, everywhere, immediately.

Everything, All of the Time.

Describing such a future with any prospect of accuracy whatsoever would, I suspect, require the kind of indepth technical knowledge of how networks operate, interface and connect with their users that simply isn't available to those of us lacking the time, means, motivation (or funds) to absorb a PhD-equivalent body of knowledge: so that leaves you, the author, with the choice of either a)ignoring the question or more often b)trying to find ways to restrict the flow of information between characters in a story.

Which, again given the way things are going these days, leads you into encryption, a science as important, if not perhaps more important, than the development of the networks and databases it's used to protect. It's all terribly complicated, and attempts to create any future containing even a whiff of plausibility inevitably gets washed up on the shores of real-world technological evolution, rendering all your carefully extrapolated work within a few years into little more than one more nostalgic tour of past visions of the future (witness the lack of mobile phones in Stephenson's Snow Crash).

Perhaps that, it occurs to me, is why fantasy is so popular these days. But that's a thought for another day. Let's just say that the point of this post is that if I had the necessary understanding of the system of the world and put it to use writing a book of the near-future, it would be called Everything, All of the TIme.

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede

That being the title of the novel by Bradley Denton, a book I well remember reading in the late 80s or early 90s, and which still sits on my bookshelves. I'd read a while back it was actually being made into a movie, and looks to be the perfect antidote to some of the 'mainstream' Hollywood product I've had to sit through recently. This new 'development' trailer certainly looks amazing, and I can't help but hope they make as good job as the reost of it.

Boing Boing have a piece about it, and since I'm too lazy to write my own synopsis of the story, I've cribbed part of theirs:

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, the premise is a simple one: Oliver Vale (whose recently deceased mother instilled in him a healthy respect for Buddy Holly) is about to watch a John Wayne movie pulled in by his satellite dish when the transmission is interrupted by a shot of a young Bully Holly, standing in a bubble on an airless rock, holding a guitar. Holly reads a sign hanging from the camera in front of him, and it says, "For assistance, contact Oliver Vale." And then he reads out Oliver's home address. 

I keep meaning to write again about those slightly obscure books that influenced me as a reader and also as a writer (I previously wrote about KW Jeter's Farewell Horizontal), and this, if I'd been a little less lazy about it, would have been a prime candidate.

Edit: Apparently the book, which has been out of print for a number of years, can nonetheless be freely downloaded under a Creative Commons license, in a variety of formats, from Manybooks.net.

Taipei

Found, on io9.com: a video taken from the front of one of Taipei's over/underground trains as it travels the Neihu line. As the writer on the website says, it's oddly hypnotic. I don't think I ever did actually travel to Neihu while I was living there, but I'm sure I must have been on that part of Taipei's ginormous mass-transit system at some point. But it does all look terribly familiar.

Source Code (with spoilers)

Well, I finally caught Source Code, enervated by all the positive reviews, but came away from the cinema feeling let down. Again. There are so many things wrong with the film I almost don't know where to start: I could simply summarise all the issues in this single statement: it makes no sense whatsoever. None of it adds up in any even vaguely rational way whatsoever, which is probably why I spent so much of my time in the cinema staring at the screen in absolute confusion.

I'm going to get spoilery here: Jake Gyllenhaal can travel back in time, into the mind of a dead man, in his last eight minutes of life, so he can figure out who planted the bomb that will blow up the train on which the dead man was/is travelling. No...wait a minute, that's not it: his mind is instead interacting with the residual radiation of a dead man's mind that the Source Code team are somehow able to tap into. The radiation contains, apparently, the dead man's final memories. So it's not time travel after all.

It's true one character states it would take too long to really explain what's going on, and in terms of cinematic shorthand, that's fine: but far, far too many liberties are subsequently taken with logic. If our hero only taps into a dead man's residual memories, why, then, is he tasked with locating a bomb on board a train that was blown up earlier in the day? How could the dead man - a passenger on that train - possibly know himself where that bomb is?  How can our hero possibly experience anything objectively real outside of the dead man's subjective experiences unless the train is, in fact, real, and (presumably) in the past?

But we're explicitly and repeatedly warned Source Code is not time travel. Our hero can't change anything in the past. because what's happening isn't in the past...it's in the present.

Isn't it?

Yeah. I'm still scratching my head over that one. Then it gets more ridiculous. Towards the end, our hero learns his body has been reduced to a ruined sack of meat in a tank wired into Source Code's computers. He's technically dead - or at least, reduced to communicating via a terminal wired directly into a part of his brain that hasn't shut down. He demands 'one last chance' to go back into the train and save the passengers - and particularly the Girl. He does. Don't ask me how, since the train isn't meant to be real. Then, somehow, instead of dying when his life support is subsequently switched off (per his wishes) he finds himself alive and hale and continuing on in the (imaginary?) body he's entered.

There's some guff tossed in about how any changes he makes in the past can have no meaning since they can only create an 'alternate reality', except I once again question how this can come about since he is - I recall - not, in fact, travelling through time, merely interfacing with some fading remnant of someone else's mind.

This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that the only way to enjoy a mainstream Hollywood movie these days is, essentially, to pretend you're far, far more stupid than you actually are. 

And yet, Duncan Jones - the director of Source Code - previously directed a perfectly acceptable, if not stunningly original, feature film called Moon. District 9 was one of the better movies I've seen in the past few years. Darren Aaronofsky's first film, a low-budget black and white effort called Pi, is easily one of my favourite films, and one of the very few I bothered to buy on DVD. Yet I found Black Swan - a bigger-budgeted, more mainstream affair - to be an atrocious mess.

I see now that the problem is with mainstream Hollywood: District 9, Pi, Moon...they're all 'indie' movies, in the sense at least that they're created on a low budget. There's a sameness to bigger-budget Hollywood films that I don't find in those cheaper, more daring productions: originality becomes smothered by studio demands for a standard three-act structure with a heroic denouement in which the hero always, always gets the girl, even if all laws of logic and sanity have to be tossed out the window in order to achieve it.

So it's indie movies and arthouse flicks for me from here on in. I've been bludgeoned by too much big budget stupidity to want to waste my time with it any more.

One last, highly spoilerific observation for those who have seen Source Code: I experienced overwhelming levels of WTF when our 'hero' has, apparently, taken over the brain of some unsuspecting schoolteacher in order to steal his girlfriend. What the hell happened to him, the schoolteacher?

And how long before our hero's new girlfriend figures out there's someone else entirely lurking inside her boyfriend's skull?