Future Thinking up at Tor.com

I have a blog piece about technology and science fiction up at Tor.com, my first appearance, I think, on that website.

'...science fiction is both an epiphenomenon and a response to the accelerating rate of technological advancement. When Mary Shelley wroteFrankenstein, the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment had already taken steps towards radically revising our understanding of how the universe works. Her most famous novel was partly inspired by experiments in which dead tissue appeared to be reanimated—to be galvanised—into unholy life by the application of an electric current. It’s rightly known as the first science fiction novel because it’s a response to both the threat and the promise of such experiments.'

Go read the rest of it here.

By the way, my email troubles are all sorted now, if you've been getting any bouncing messages from me in the recent past. 

Email

Just a quick note to say that if you've emailed me at gary@garygibson.net and haven't received a reply, it's because setting up this new version of the website involved diving into the domain registrar and making changes there - changes that appear to have screwed up the email forwarding that comes with the domain name. I'm far from conversant in such matters, so let's just say until you hear otherwise, if you want to hear from me, you have three options: use my other email (garymgibson@gmail.com), message me on Facebook, or message or DM me on Twitter. This isn't a major problem, just an annoying one that will hopefully be resolved soon-ish.

And you can consider it now resolved and fixed at last. 

Marauder wraparound cover and some trailers

Tor UK just posted both the complete wraparound cover for the upcoming hardback edition of Marauder (released in September) and an interview with not only myself, but also Steve Stone, who's responsible for the new art for my first five books, just reissued.

Look at that full cover art. Just look at it (and click on each to get the full glory).

Steve mentions in passing in his own interview that he's just directed and produced his first film, Entity, due out in the UK in June. This is something of a recurring theme, because when I recently contacted Lee Gibbons - who did the art for the original editions of the Shoal Trilogy - he mentioned his foray into book trailers.

So here's the trailer for Steve's movie, Entity -

. and here's a trailer by Lee for Tin Moon, his book trailer project, which is rather fun.

First Drafts now and then

A year or two back I wrote an article for a manuscript agency's website on something I called 'the one third slump', by which I meant the way a novel, outlined or otherwise, tended to dribble off into confusion round about the thirty or forty thousand word mark. This used to really freak me out when it happened to me, in a OH GOD MY NOVEL DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE TOR WILL ASK FOR THEIR MONEY BACK I'LL END UP ON THE STREETS DRINKING GUTTER WATER kind of way. When it happened to my third novel, Stealing Light, instead of completely losing my shit, as they say, I took my six thousand word outline and revised it in order to try and figure out what was and what wasn't working in the novel. That's when I realised writing is a bit like planning an invasion or storming a building with hostages inside. However much you prepare, however much you train, all your preparations aren't worth shit about five minutes after you hit the beach and logistics meet cold hard reality. What I thought would work, didn't work, but that's always the case with initial outlines.

So I went back and re-planned for a month. At the end of that process I had a 22,000 word outline. The result was my most successful and bestselling book to date. It, along with four other of my earlier novels, just got re-released by Tor with brand new cover art and design, so as writing processes go, I guess intensive outlining works for me.

My writing habits, however, appear to be in flux once more. One of the drawbacks of my writing method in terms of actually getting words onto paper is that I sometimes become neurotically obsessed with getting the words just right even when I know there's a reasonable chance those words will need to get chopped later on. I think I've broken the habit, and for the first time in my life I've managed to write myself all the way up to 95,000 words of the current manuscript without yet feeling a creeping urge to stop dead, re-outline everything and only then write the end. Instead I'm ploughing through to the bitter end and ignoring all the structural faults that would previously have brought me to a screeching halt, saving that work instead for a later draft.

It feels to me a little like flying blind. But I've realised I like re-writing a first draft a whole lot better than writing it. This is a Good Thing, because I'm obsessing less with getting things 'just right' in the first draft. I'm happy just to bang down the main ideas and then go through it sentence by sentence and character motivation by character motivation in order to sort out what works and what...needs work. I figure I'll finish this extremely rough first draft in a week or two. Then I'll spend longer planning and re-structuring the story and, now I've had the opportunity to spend some time with them and see what makes them tick, work out my characters in much more detail. Whether or not this might produce a better/more successful book I can't begin to say, but hopefully it'll be a less stressful one. 

Future Thinking

Tor UK asked me to do an article for their website, in support of the current spate of re-issues of my backlist:

One of the things you often hear people say these days is that science fiction is in danger of being overtaken by the sheer pace of advancements in science and technology. It’s an understandable refrain, particularly when the news is filled with reports about downloadable blueprints for building guns with those same 3D printers. The feeling that you’re living in a world co-scripted by John Varley and John Brunner tends to grow when you take a quick scan through any number of online news sites and discover front-page features on exoplanets, life extension, and NASA research into Alcubierre drives. It might seem that in the face of such remarkable advances, science fiction might no longer be as relevant as it once was, reality having in many respects caught up with it. You might think that, but you would be wrong. 

Read the rest here.

You also have a chance to win some of my books over at Tor UK's facebook page.

Windows Hate

I had occasion to be reminded just why I switched to Mac this afternoon. I was in town with my brother and his girlfriend (both visiting from Malaysia) where we picked up a cheap but hopefully good quality laptop (a Packard Bell) for our mother, whose computer died a few days back. We headed across the road to get it started up, download some software, the usual kind of thing, and I mucked around with Metro for a while and figured out some things.

Now, I'm no dummy with computers, but 'intuitive' is not a word I'd use to describe Windows 8. I might even have preferred to have 7 on it, but of course you don't get a choice. Even after half an hour I still couldn't figure out how to close some of the Windows 'apps'.

It makes me even more determined that if I ever have occasion to buy a non-Mac computer - and it's entirely possible, if I want something ultra-light and portable with a decent keyboard - the first thing I'll do is install Ubuntu, which, frankly, seems to me the better operating system (it's installed on my wife's computer). 

Celebration Day

Today is the official release day for the entire repackaged and republished Shoal Trilogy, comprising Stealing Light, Nova War and Empire of Light, and to which my next book, Marauder, due out later this year, is a kinda-sorta sequel cum standalone.

Here's a picture of them spine-on, leached from the Tor website. Aren't they pretty?

(If you want to see them in their full resplendent glory, merely click on the 'my books' tab up there and they will be revealed.)

In the meantime, I've got a quick five-question interview posted up at the moment over at Tor UK, in which I answer questions like: who would play Dakota in the films? Did I have a 'space dust' problem in my pre-teens? And, you know, books and stuff. 

Deborah J Miller

Well, I just heard some horrible news, that fantasy author Deborah J Miller just passed away. I first knew Debbie when she was writing as Miller Lau, when she had some fantasy novels out at the turn of the century. We were stablemates at Tor Uk for a couple of years, and I first got introduced to her by fellow writer Mike Cobley. Debbie was one of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

I have a recollection of telling her how I thought she had looked terribly exotic in her author photos in her early novels, not realising the reason she was wearing a turban was because of a long battle with cancer. When I last saw her, at a convention a few years back shortly after (I think) my return from Taiwan, she was walking with a stick, and I believe her cancer had recurred. By then, she was putting a lot of her energy into running and promoting the David Gemmell Awards.

I'm not sure what else I can say beyond that really, except, perhaps, fuck cancer. There's some more details here.

New books

So the other day I found a snazzy little picture someone had posted on Twitter of the new editions of the Shoal Trilogy which they had, apparently, received for review. I hadn't realised Tor were sending out review copies, but if they are, and you're a reviewer and you want copies, you might want to drop an enquiring line their way.

I finally found copies in my local Waterstones the other day and my, they do look snazzy. I mean, they look seriously good with the wraparound Steve Stone art and the new 'b' format paperback size. I need to finish up a Q&A on the reissues today, and you can expect to see that up at the Tor site sometime later this week. 

New and updated site

As I said back in March, the site needed a bit of a spring-clean and it was starting to look a bit old-fashioned and cluttered. I thought about going for some paid services - and some of them, like squarespace.com, offer some very attractive packages indeed - but my steely cold Scottish heart just can't countenance the expenditure. Spending money. On a website?

So instead I got back inside the guts of my blogger account and created this new, updated version - which is also accessible, I should remind you, through the garygibson.net domain as well as through its blogger address. It's not a hundred per cent complete - I'd like to figure out how to include some drop down menus without having to essentially redo a bunch of stuff I've somehow managed to do without quite knowing how I did it, and for that reason I'll leave it for another day. But suffice to say the new site looks cleaner, and has several static pages instead of landing immediately on the blog itself. There's information about the books, and also various articles and so forth that have appeared around the net. In the future I'll incorporate various interviews and other bits and pieces. I also need to incorporate my Twitter and other social media accounts and contact details.

I did this at least partly, if not mainly, because it made sense to do so with the new books coming out, and I didn't want people googling me just to find a dusty, cluttered blog that might at times not be updated for weeks or even months. 

New cover and Eastercon

Those concerned at my relative sparsity hereabouts should know I spend my time most often these days on Twitter, as @garygibsonsf.  I sometimes check out potential providers for building a static front page for this here blog with lots of details about the books and so forth, and maybe I'm just a cheapskate, but I ain't yet seen anything I'm comfortable spending real money on, as good as some of them are (I particularly liked what they offer over at Strikingly.com, but it's still just too expensive).

Not to say there aren't some things to report: the cover artwork for Marauder recently popped up online and started quietly spreading around, so I figured it was time to get it out and about. And so, here it is, the artwork for my next book, now due out at the start of September.

I'll emphasise that although this is set in the same universe as the Shoal trilogy, it's a separate, stand-alone story. You won't need to have read those previous books, and even though there are a few plot strands that connect it to certain prior events, everything you need to know to understand and enjoy the book is there. I must say, I'm particularly proud of this one, and I think you're going to like it.

I'll be at Eastercon in Bradford this coming weekend, getting down by rail and arriving at the actual con, I suspect, at about 6 on Friday early evening before diving straight into things. I'm only doing one panel, kind of a general thing on writing, at five on Saturday afternoon. There's something called a 'genre get-together' at 7 on Saturday evening I'm apparently part of. Outside of that, I'll be here, there and everywhere. 

Movies

With all the fuss over the Oscars, I felt driven somehow to point you at some things I've seen over the last year which I think, in most cases, are better than the current contenders (the Oscars are actually over at the time of writing this, but I still don't know who the winners are). To be clear - I liked Argo, but I don't think it's the best movie of the year. Django Unchained was, I thought, a return to form for Tarantino, although I think he had about two movies worth of material in a single work - enough so he might have been better going down the same route he did with Kill Bill 1 & 2. I also enjoyed Zero Dark Thirty, and thought it a clever, smart movie that in no way remotely condones torture - rather the opposite, in fact. I haven't, unfortunately, seen Lincoln, although from what I've seen and heard both it and its lead actor deserve their nominations.

But there are always movies that I am surprised to find are not even nominated. Here's the one that particularly struck me as glaring omissions:

The Hunter - based on a novel by Julia Leigh, starring Willem Dafoe as a man sent by a biotech company to find and kill the last Tasmanian tiger so they can benefit from unique properties inherent in the creature's biochemistry (essentially, they want to develop a powerful nerve agent). This is one of those man-against-nature and man-against-man movies. It's powerful and gripping and reminds me why Dafoe is such a superb actor. Definitely one of my movies of the year.

A Royal Affair - this is based on a true story. IMDB says: "In 1767, the British Princess Caroline is betrothed to the mad King Christian VII of Denmark, but her life with the erratic monarch in the oppressive country becomes an isolating misery. However, Christian soon gains a fast companion with the German Dr. Johann Struensee, a quietly idealistic man of the Enlightenment. As the only one who can influence the King, Struensee is able to begin sweeping enlightened reforms of Denmark through Christian even as Caroline falls for the doctor. However, their secret affair proves a tragic mistake that their conservative enemies use to their advantage in a conflict that threatens to claim more than just the lovers as their victims."

What's remarkable about this Danish film is that it feels weirdly science-fictional. Both Caroline and Struensee (played by the same chap who appeared as le Chiffre in Casino Royale) are effectively airdropped into a society considerably more backwards than their own, so that they almost feel like time travelers from the present lost in a scarcely post-medieval society - but with the unique privilege of being able to change it.

Finally, I'd recommend The Sessions - also based on a true story: "At the age of 38, Mark O'Brien, a man who uses an iron lung, decides he no longer wishes to be a virgin. With the help of his therapist and his priest, he contacts Cheryl Cohen-Greene, a professional sex surrogate and a typical soccer mom with a house, a mortgage and a husband. Inspired by a true story, The Surrogate, follows the fascinating relationship which evolves between Cheryl and Mark as she takes him on his journey to manhood."

In summary like that, it sounds like some kind of American Pie affair, but it's really, really not. It's way smarter and cleverer than that. O'Brien was a noted poet, with several books of his work out, despite being completely immobilised from youth. And it shows, through the dialogue and his interactions with the people and the women around him, and it's hardly surprising, if this movie is anything to judge by (and assuming it's an accurate portrayal of his life) that so many women ended up falling in love with him.

So there you go: three recommendations from me.