Trust

Sometimes, I think, the hardest thing you can do as a writer, even after many years, is to trust yourself. It feels a little too much like closing your eyes at the wheel of a speeding car, of putting your trust in the force. It's as if you have to keep an eye on yourself all the time, to worry and fret, because if you don't, the words won't be as good.

I think now the problem with that attitude - which is largely unconscious, I think, and is shared by many writers of varying pedigrees - is that it assumes the writing process is entirely conscious. Large parts of it are, of course: you have to do a lot of thinking in this job. There are a lot of moments of sudden stillness, eyes fixed on the middle distance, while you search for some connection, some way of reconciling parts of a story that don't quite somehow fit. But the fact that revelation - sudden insights, previously missed connections - occur spontaneously, and when you least expect it, indicates that a lot of writing is, in fact, unconscious. It comes out of the fingers, via the subconscious. Your fingers know how to do the dance without being told.

This occurs to me because a while back I calculated how many words I've written since I sold my first ever short story waaaay back in 1990, and it's well over a million - and the very vast bulk of that took place following the publication of my first novel. My career has in itself been an education in how to become a writer. Learning on the job, essentially.

In other news, I'm in serious danger of becoming a cycling bore. I've always enjoyed cycling, and have always cycled, only slightly because I never learned to drive. Sometime recently some internal barrier was broken and now I'm cycling more and more. When I'm back in Taiwan, I will be considering a silly amount of money on a half-decent road bike (as opposed to my current cheap-ish Ridgeback hybrid). 

The Thousand Emperors is out in paperback today

My seventh novel, The Thousand Emperors (or 1kE as I am sometimes known to describe it) is out today in paperback in the UK, and is also available on Kindle and as an audiobook in both the UK and North America (I'm not 100% sure about the audiobook in the US, but it's definitely available through Audible.co.uk).

It's technically a sequel to my previous novel, Final Days, but it's been written as a standalone - it's set so far in the future after Final Days it constitutes a brand new setting and story, so, no, you don't at all have to have read the previous volume, though at the same time there are elements of this new novel that should take on an extra depth if you have. I've got to say I'm particularly proud of this one. It's the first time where I essentially actually felt like I knew what I was doing when I was writing a book, at least in retrospect (how it feels when I'm actually in the process of writing is a quite different matter. I never feel like I know what I'm doing when I'm deep in a first or second draft).

So, go buy, if you're so inclined, and hope you get a kick out of it. So far, to my amazement, it's not had a single bad review on Amazon, either here or in the US. Here's to my first one-star review whenever it appears!

Time versus Work

Writing is a strange thing. There's less corollary between the time spent on it and the amount and quality of what's produced than you might think. Stephen King's spent a couple of decades producing massive doorstoppers with just four hours of writing a day; and what you see on the shelves doesn't include the stuff he abandoned halfway through (though sometimes, as with Under the Dome, he picks up on it again much later). The American writer Dean Wesley Smith appears to produce an insane quantity of writing - short stories, books - a year. I'm sure I read somewhere Iain Banks spent maybe two or three months a year writing each new book to the final draft. Any numbers of writers I know or follow online write maybe two thousand words a day (as I do), and it probably doesn't take them much more than a couple of hours. Others, like Tony Ballantyne, with a busy day job schedule and a family, I seem to recall, can afford maybe fifteen minutes out of each day.

I had a hard time waking up today and felt fuzzy, despite a good night's sleep, until maybe 1pm. It's now 2.12, and up until lunchtime I couldn't find it in me to write a damn word.  It just doesn't come. I keep getting that sense of misplaced guilt that I should be working, damn it: but that's silly. It's silly, because sitting bashing out words for eight hours a day produces work of less quality, not better. The brain is an organ of the body, after all, and can only sustain intensive work for so long...or so experience suggests to me.

In that past hour, I wrote maybe a thousand words. The writing comes like that: in fast, intensive spurts of activity. It's been like that from day one. I spend most of the day beforehand feeling guilty I'm not writing, and then when my brain tells me it's ready, boom. Out it comes.

Now I'll probably have some lunch, potter about, and boom (hopefully) another thousand words.

It's at times like this it's worth reminding myself I'm actually very lucky to get to do this job. 

Pacific Rim: a review

Pacific Rim is probably the best bad movie I've seen in a while. By which I mean, it is not a movie that inspires you to actually bury your head in your hands, or to stare, appalled, through fanned fingers while thinking: what were you thinking? What were you thinking? Which is the effect a lot of recent 'blockbusters' like, say, Prometheus or the Star Trek reboot have had on me. That it's not actively bad is not the same thing, however, as saying it's necessarily great. 

There are two things that persuaded me to see this film: good reviews from sometimes surprising corners, and Guillermo Del Toro. Essentially, Del Toro did the best that could be done with the material, and with the plot and leading characters essentially demanded by a studio keeping a close eye on the returns. Financial necessity demands burly, not very bright leading characters, and a lot of monster-on-robot action. Anything else would likely have led to a box-office failure and less chance for Del Toro to gain the funding for the much more interesting and more personal projects that have so far made his career. And that's how I like to think of Pacific Rim: essentially a fundraiser for the movies Del Toro really wants to make. And that's fine. In that respect, the movie is more interesting for its implied politics than for its own story, what little there is of it. 

It says a great deal that three secondary characters prove far more interesting than the leads, who don't really need to do much more than stand on their mark and flex their muscles. I've seen it noted that the movie, unlike many of its type, actually has some character development, and while that's true, in the main it's only really sketched in. There's nothing there - in terms of the leads, at least - that you can't easily predict. That this has been noted as a positive attribute is not so much a reflection of the quality of the film's character development as it is a reflection of the lack of it in other, similar, big-budget CGI spectaculars. 

And, again, that's okay, because the world is full of hyper thirteen-year olds overdosing on sugar water and with a deep-seated need to see robots fighting monsters, and they deserve entertainment too. But it's in the details you can see the better, if considerably less profitable, movie that might have been made. 

Specifically, the two 'comedy' scientists, along with Ron Perlman's Hannibal Chau, are far more interesting than anyone else in the film. As I watched, I found myself imagining a far better movie: one in which the Kaiju (monsters) are simply an ongoing and occasional fact of life, with no immediate solution at hand to satisfy the Hollywood need for a climactic ending.  In this better movie, the two scientists, Geiszler and Gottlieb - particularly Geiszler, with his Kaiju tattoos, and Chau, the underworld kaiju organ dealer - are the leads. The monsters, to a very great extent, are in the background (in this movie in my head), and only glimpsed as the story leads our much more interesting 'secondary' characters through an adventure in many respects only tangentially related to the monsters. 

The fact is the movie only becomes genuinely interesting when it focuses on the culture that grows around the kaiju: whole districts of cities built around the remains of fallen monsters, and an entire black market industry dealing in kaiju skin, organs, bones and even parasites. The point where Chau is first seen, in a vast hidden marketplace of Kaiju organs, bones and teeth, is the one truly Del Toro moment of the movie. Every time we moved away from Chau and the scientists, I felt disappointed. I wanted to see more about this world, because it was fascinating. But every time it felt like we were about to discover more about a world that's learned to cope with the presence of skyscraper-sized rampaging monsters, we instead had to watch a robot and a monster hit each other a lot. 

And this is all why Pacific Rim is the best bad movie I've seen in a while. It's not really a bad movie, because it does precisely what it's intended to. It's disappointing, in the sense that I've seen very good reviews of it by people whose opinions I usually respect, so that's more of a personal thing. But oh, to see a film that focuses entirely on Chau, and his kaiju organs recovery team, and Geiszler and Gottlieb as his two most devoted customers...

(a side note: I again find it deeply interesting that once again, the heroes of the day are brooding Hollywood hulks with grim expressions, while the smartest guys in the room - Geiszler and Gottlieb, without whose combined brains humanity is entirely doomed - are treated as light comic relief. I'd hesitate to suggest it signals the end of Western Civilisation, but neither would I say it's a positive reflection on our culture.)

New blog piece up at Torbooks.co.uk

I've written another piece for torbooks.co.uk, the website for my publisher, on the path that led me to being a full-time writer:

The first time I sold a book, I got an email from a friend saying ‘that’s it! You’ve got a book published. You can die now.’

Writing a book – or rather, writing it and then seeing it published – is the kind of thing that turns up on bucket lists of Things To Do Before You Die. A while back there was a survey – I think it was in the Guardian – where they asked people what careers they most aspired to, and ‘novelist’ came out top of the pile. So speaking as a published author of some ten years standing, I guess I’m doing pretty well.

But it takes a lot of work and dedication to get there. And even having one book out isn’t enough. If you actually want to make a career out of it – and there’s an unspoken assumption that you do – you need to write another. And then another. And yet another. Preferably at a rate of one a year.

You can read the rest here.  

Kip Thorne

Sometimes I see movies or tv shows and curse because they're using some really cool idea I came up with years ago all on my own. It's not plagiarism, of course, just parallel evolution. That unfinished fantasy novel sitting on my hard drive since the mid-Nineties about a Chinese warrior trying to recover an ancient and powerful Chinese artefact in mid-19th Century America in the company of an American Indian? Shanghai Noon, more or less, or certainly close enough. It was Steampunk before there was really that much in the way of Steampunk bar a few James Blaylock and KW Jeter novels.

Or there's the pattern gun in another unfinished novel, Wonderland, all about psychedelics, CIA experiments in mind control, abstract art (seriously) and non-Euclidean dimensions. Once, years later, while watching an episode of Fringe, I shouted loud enough to frighten the neighbours when I saw a weapon I thought only I had invented for that selfsame novel used on one of the show's characters - a handheld device that projects patterns of flashing light that cause the viewer to have a seizure or become unconscious. In my book, it was called a Pattern Gun.

I just read an article about Kip Thorne in the Guardian that makes me happy, because Christopher Nolan's next big movie project is based around the same exact physics developed by Thorne that I used in Final Days. It's nice to be first, just for once. 

Iain Banks

People have been talking about their memories of Iain Banks over the last couple of days. Like a lot of you, hearing the news first about his cancer and then his sudden passing-away felt like a gut-punch. It's something that brought shock and anger and I know there are a good few people in the world of publishing this week who didn't get much work done the day they heard the news of his passing. Banks' passing leaves a very, very large Banks-shaped hole in both general and science fiction that's going to be exceedingly hard, if not downright impossible, to fill. His contribution was that important.

With that in mind, I've seen people sharing stories, and in the spirit of that ongoing virtual wake, it feels like the right time to share the memories of my own, few and exceedingly brief encounters with Banks.

The first time I met Iain Banks in person was back about 1989 or 1990 when I carried out an interview with him for some tiny, tiny local magazine that probably pretty much nobody bought, ever. I had a notion towards becoming some kind of magazine journalist at the time, which had led me to interview Grant Morrison not long before - not a difficult feat, since both lived fairly locally. I got in touch with Banks' publisher, and a few short weeks later got a train to Edinburgh and found my way to his flat, in the company of a colleague lugging a frankly huge tape recorder. At that time, Banks lived fairly centrally, not far from the city centre.

I still have that interview somewhere, in a back issue hidden in some cupboard or other. It's probably not interesting enough, in all honesty, to dig out and reprint here. It probably doesn't help either that Banks is probably just about the single most interviewed writer on the planet ever, ever. I mean the man gave interviews to just about everyone. You'd be hard put to dig up any kind of sf fanzine, magazine or general culture 'zine printed between 1985 and 2000 with even the most glancing interest in literature or geek culture that didn't feature a few words from the man.

He proved, as anyone who has ever met him knows, to be ebullient and charming and entertaining, all at once. My primary memory is this:

I had noticed a medium-sized dinner plate nailed to a wall in the kitchen where we conducted the interview. Some indeterminate yet roughly circula object clung to the surface of the dinner plate, and I asked what it was. Banks replied that during a particularly good party, either he or someone of his acquaintance had thought it might be a terribly good idea to make a microwave pizza, except instead of setting it for, say, twelve minutes, they set it at something like a hundred and twenty and then promptly forgot about it. By the time the thing eventually pinged, the pizza's dessicated and quite possibly mummified remains were now, apparently, permanently welded to the surface of the plate. I noted at the time that it now resembled nothing so much as the 'flying pancake' monster from an old episode of Star Trek (specifically Operation: Annihilate, Google informs me).

Most people would chuck the whole thing in the bin. But Banks? Nope. He nailed it to the wall as a tribute to one particularly rockin' party. That, then, is my main memory of Banks.

I met him on just two occasions since then that I can remember. The second-last time was at the bar of a convention hotel right here in Glasgow in, I think, 2005. I hadn't realised he was there until he said hello, having apparently recognised me even after all those years. We chatted briefly, he mentioned something about having just gotten divorced (I'd had no idea), and then we went our separate ways. The last time was just last year at a monthly writer's event, again in Glasgow, where he had been invited to say a few words. I made a point of saying hello afterwards, having no idea it was the last time I would ever set eyes on him, although in truth he seemed distracted. Given this was quite some time before the announcement of his illness, I have no idea whatsoever whether he yet had any inkling regarding his condition. I prefer to think he was just a bit hungover.

I am going to miss his books, both with and without the 'M', very much. 

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.