Ubuntu

Ubuntu being, of course, the free operating system that's based on linux (that's based on unix). I've got some limited experience of big nasty unix. Years ago, I started but then gave up on a programming post-grad once I realised I had zero aptitude for it, and one of the things I do remember (we're talking mid- to late-nineties here) is playing around with unix. Ever since then, I've become a really big fan of operating systems where you don't need to have one damn idea how it works as long as it works. Like OSX, for instance, on my macbook here.

Even so, my persistent interest in technology persuaded me to try Ubuntu a couple of times in the past, only to give up whenever it started yelling something about kernels at me. Nice idea, but not nearly as user-friendly as I would have liked.

Cut to a few weeks ago when Emma's laptop stuck its legs in the air and started making death-rattle noises. Or rather, shut down and then obstinately refused to start up again. Don't ask me how, but it appeared Windows was terminally shafted. Within forty-eight hours we'd picked up another brand-new laptop, a cheap one for just a couple hundred that's proved to be surprisingly solid.

I got around to tinkering with the 'dead' laptop and coaxed it back into life by installing a new Ubuntu operating system and, lo and behold, it's startlingly good. I actually can't believe how fast it starts up, and installation was done with such a minimum of fuss that assuming your needs don't extend beyond (say) open office, firefox, skype and dropbox for backup, I don't see any reason anyone would ever want to bother with Windows again. It is quite incredibly user friendly.

Now all I have to do is figure what's making that aggressive whirring sound; my bets are a dying fan. So it's off to Ebay.

Recommendations and Leith

Here's a recommendation for all the budding writers amongst you: Science Fiction 101" by Robert Silverberg (originally published as Worlds of Wonder). It's an anthology of Silverberg's favourite science fiction from a period spanning roughly 1953 to 1966, and includes a great number of stories regarded by many as genre classics. Some I love, some I love perhaps not so much, but what makes this stand out is Silverberg's commentary. Every story is accompanied by an essay in which he picks the story apart in order to figure out not only why it ticks, but what it is about the story that makes it so highly-regarded. This elevates it to the position of being an invaluable book for those wanting to write long or short-form science fiction (as a matter of fact, one of the things that decided me to buy it was a review by Joe Haldeman on the book's Amazon.com page which sang its praises). The opening autobiographical essay, in which Silverberg recounts the ways in which he obsessively analyzed fiction as a teenager in his drive to become a professional author, is worth the price of the book alone.

There's some great stories in there - Day Million, The Light of Other Days - and one or two others I can't help but find terribly creaky and old-fashioned, such as Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live in Vain (What may not have helped in terms of reading the latter, much of which is set during a secret meeting of 'scanners' or interstellar pilots, is that I had a hard time not picturing it in the form of the Ku Klux Klan musical sequence in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?). It's a highly regarded story - I'm just not entirely sure why.

Time to read recently has been scant. I'm on a long hard drive to finish Final Days by the early July deadline and, as I may have mentioned before (or maybe I didn't) I lost a lot of writing time because of the move back to the UK. As a result, I'm a little more rushed than usual, and therefore have rather less of a life at the moment than I usually do. Once the book's in, I can chill for a couple of weeks and catch up on reading and watching.

The event in Leith went well, although it wasn't as busy as it usually is. If you want to see more of your favourite writers and you live in the Edinburgh area, it's well worth your time checking it out this time next year. Prior to taking part in my own panel, I spent some time sitting in on a reading that included Ron Butlin, Zoe Strachan and Louise Welsh - the latter the author of, amongst others, The Cutting Room and The Bullet Trick, very fine novels set in Glasgow, and which I highly recommend you check out. What I found amusing was that the instant the 'mainstream' authors were done, they and their audience departed en masse the moment it was announced the following item would be about Haikasoru, the Nick Mamatas-edited Japanese-sf-in-translation imprint. Hey, their loss.

Coming Up

I'm taking part in an event as part of the Leith Festival of Literature on June Sunday 13th at Bond No 9, 84 Commercial Street in Leith at 5pm. It'll be my first trip to Edinburgh since my return to the UK, so I'm quite looking forward to it. It's an all-day event, and Fate has conspired to place me on a panel called 'SF Scramble':

Editor and Scotsman SF critic Andrew J. Wilson (Nova Scotia) in discussion with author Gary Gibson (Stealing Light, Against Gravity) and translator Edwin Hawkes on the challenges and rewards of translating genre fiction. Interspersed with readings of the very best of Japanese science fiction, fantasy and horror in English, including a sneak preview of the forthcoming English edition of Tow Ubukata’s phenomenal bestselling Mardock Scramble.

Everything I know about translating fiction could probably be scribbled on the back of a very, very small napkin, but then I've had stuff translated before, so I guess I'm there to be the voice of one who has been translated, rather than one who translates (on the other hand, I am married to someone who's done a lot of translation work herself in the past). One way or other, I know Andrew, and recently met Edwin, and I don't think the three of us'll have too much trouble getting an interesting discussion going.

And only a month to go! Empire of Light is out in hardback on July 2nd, and the paperback of Nova War is out the same day - although if past experience is anything to go by, they'll be on sale a good few days before that. If you're an ebook reader, I noticed recently that Stealing Light and Nova War are both available for the Kindle at a pretty decent price, and I've also seen the epub version of both on sale at bookdepository.com. I've no idea what the pricing on the ebook of Empire of Light will be, but it'll presumably go on sale at the start of July as well.  

More Ipad thoughts

Although I wasn't entirely blown away by my brief twenty-minutes-or-so experience with an Ipad in Glasgow's Apple Store, various reviews and commentary such as this got me thinking that sometime somebody's going to have the clever idea that what we really need is a kind of missing link, halfway between the Ipad and an actual laptop: essentially, a laptop with a screen you can lift off a mount and use as a touchpad if you so choose. That way you've got a machine you can browse on while lying half off the couch, then take through to your home office, click it together with the keyboard (or into a frame containing the keyboard) and use it exactly like a regular laptop.

Then I saw this and realized that the world had once again figured this out long before me. Unfortunately, they all run Windows. Yech.

Which brings me to my next prediction: someone's going to come up with a hard-case for the Ipad and its bluetooth keyboard that essentially simulates a laptop, while allowing it to retain the convenience of a standalone touchpad. Then we're really talking.

Edit: Oh. Right. Duh. According to Blarkon in the comments, it's already here.  And it is rather pretty.

Ipad

So I finally saw one in town today, at the big Apple shop in Buchanan Street. It was quite impressive. It feels very, very nice to hold in your hands. The screen quality is good. It looks like it would be terrific for reading comics, magazines and books, in that order. I tend to prefer non-backlit books - hence my Sony Reader - but ebooks I've bought for work or reference are ones I tend to prefer looking at on a screen anyway, and in that respect the Ipad is perfect for that kind of random browsing (although I must say I thought the letters in the 'Pooh' book included in the Ipad I played around with looked relatively low-resolution compared to my E-ink reader). In all respects, it appears to be a fabulous toy.

And yet, and yet...

I didn't feel as excited as I thought I would. This may be a certain over-familiarity with it from following the news about it online for some months, and it may also be the outrageous price: £430. It was fun, but not necessarily more fun than, say, the Macbook on which I'm writing just now, which is by far and away the very best computer I have ever owned. A desire to get back into reading magazines and comics without necessarily owning printed objects is not enough, unfortunately, to justify that kind of price tag.

So I guess I feel just a tiny bit disappointed, or perhaps I should say not as knocked out as I was hoping to be. Perhaps I would have to use it more, although I did play around with it for quite a while. It was cool, rather than awesome. Would I still like one? Yeah, maybe. For half the price.

Excerpt from Empire of Light

There's just over a month to go before the publication of Empire of Light, so I figured I could give you a quick preview of one of the early chapters. Here it is:

Chapter Two

Nathan Driscoll looked up and noticed that one of the suns had gone out.

He stepped back, his hands greasy with gore and his nostrils full of the scent of burned flesh, and watched as an evac team carried away the injured soldier he had been tending, and then loaded him into a waiting air-ambulance. The medbox units that had once been an integral part of the ambulance's interior had long since been stripped out, so the soldier's stretcher was instead slotted into one of several brackets, the rest of them already occupied by other injured men and women.

Nathan studied the pattern of dim red balls that clung to the coreship's curving ceiling, a dozen kilometres above the city of Ascension, his breath frosting the air. He couldn't work out precisely which of the thousands of fusion globes had just failed, but he had sensed the sudden, marginal drop in ambient light; the world had just become a little bit darker than it already was. He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck in a futile attempt to counter the biting cold.

He brought his gaze back down, and in that moment saw her.

A group of refugees - perhaps a dozen men, women and children in all - was making its way past the ruined façade of a mall about half a block away. Probably they'd been forced to abandon their homes as the fighting between the Consortium and Peralta's terroristas spread along the banks of First Canal. Despite the half-light, Nathan had spotted a woman with long brown hair gathered up in a band, her terrified features smeared with dirt.

It was only the briefest of glimpses, but his heart leapt nonetheless.

Ilsa.

Almost as soon as he'd spotted her, a cadence of ground-rattling thumps heralded the return of a four-legged rover-unit from the battle, troopers clinging to its sides while the most seriously injured were lifted on to pallets mounted on top of the rover itself. Nathan rushed forward, with the other two volunteer medics, and helped to load the wounded into another air-ambulance that had dropped to the fractured tarmac almost as soon as the previous one had lifted off.

Nathan began to doubt himself, even as he worked. It had been the merest, most fleeting glimpse: only part of her face had been visible. She had been wrapped up in layers of clothing, a rag pulled tight around her neck to ward off the plummeting temperatures; because, ever since the Shoal had abandoned them, the temperature had dropped even as the light failed. It didn't take a genius to realize the coreship was dying.

Nathan pulled himself up inside the second air-ambulance, along with Kellogg and the other new volunteer whose name he'd already forgotten. The ambulance's jets began to whine, preparing for take-off, but his mind was on other things.

He was almost certainly mistaken, of course, as he imagined he saw Ilsa everywhere he looked: in the faces of the troopers and volunteer aid workers, or among the refugees who vastly outnumbered them all; or the corpses that had come to fill the streets and canals as the fighting intensified.

But then again, this might have been her. It might have been Ilsa. If he could find her ... if she was still alive ...

Nathan hopped back down from the open rear of the ambulance. He could see no sign of the refugees, but he guessed they were heading for the shores of the canal. His fluorescent plastic waistcoat - meant to identify him clearly as a non-combatant - flapped around his waist in the backwash from the jets.

'Nathan!' Kellogg bellowed down at him. 'What the fuck do you think you're doing‌?'

Nathan looked up, shook his head. 'I saw someone I know,' he yelled over the noise.

More than likely the refugees intended to wade across the canal under cover of darkness, since the bridges were frequently targeted. If they could get to the other side, they had a chance at escaping the worst of the fighting.

'Nathan, get the fuck back in!' Kellogg yelled again. 'Once this thing goes, it goes!'

'I'll find my own way back,' Nathan replied, and started to jog away, heading towards the canal. Kellogg yelled something else, but the words were lost as the ambulance's VTOL jets lifted it high above the ground. It tipped its nose in the direction of Third Canal and northwest, and began to accelerate.

The streetlights had been down ever since Peralta had targeted the city's primary fusion reactor systems. Nathan stripped off his waistcoat and shoved it deep inside a pile of rubble.

He jogged on past the ruined mall and kept going, squinting into the deep shadows as he went. He alternated between running and walking until he finally arrived exhausted at the banks of First Canal several minutes later. His bones ached, and more than ever he felt the slow onslaught of late middle age.

Nathan crossed the street and peered down the embankment at the black waters. The dark shapes of bodies drifted by, carried along by the artificial tide. Ice had formed on either side of the canal, and he squinted up and down its length until he sighted a huddle of dark shapes moving along the path at the foot of the slope, maybe fifty metres away.

Nathan slipped and skidded down the steep stone facing of the embankment until he reached the path they were on. Some of the refugees were already braving the ice and the freezing cold to wade across the slow-moving waters.

'Hey!' he yelled, waving as he came towards them.

Several turned and shouted out in fear, assuming, in the dim light, that he must be one of Peralta's soldiers. A few more threw themselves further into the water and started swimming frantically.

Nathan slowed down and raised his hands. Their faces, even in the faint light, were clouded with terror and suspicion. 'I'm not with Peralta or anyone else,' he yelled. 'I'm just looking for somebody. I thought she might be ... '

Then he moved a step closer and saw her: an angular woman with brown hair, her eyes dulled by fatigue. It wasn't Ilsa, though. Now he could see her more clearly, he could only wonder how he might have made such a mistake.

'What the hell are you doing, running straight at us like that!' one of them demanded, his face looking bruised and ugly in the dim light, fists bunched in readiness at his sides. Like the rest, he wore several layers of extra clothing to try and keep the cold out, the topmost layers already ragged and worn.

'I'm sorry, I-'

Bright light suddenly flared down on them. Nathan crouched instinctively, and squinted up the embankment towards several figures that had suddenly appeared there, silhouetted by arc lights mounted on top of a rover. He heard one of the refugees mutter the word terrorista, but Nathan knew these new arrivals were Consortium troopers.

Some of the troopers quickly made their way down a series of steps leading to the waterside path, their weapons held up in readiness against their shoulders. The rover came closer to the rim of the embankment, its blunt, instrument-shrouded head swinging slowly from side to side, scanning the environment constantly for threats. Its brilliant light shone down on the filthy waters, illuminating the bloated shapes of the dead.

One of the troopers came up close, pushing her visor up to reveal a small round face, a lick of dirty blonde hair pushing out from under her heavy black helmet. Karen, he realized with a shock. Sergeant Karen Salk, his sometime lover.

She grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the rest of the refugees, who had finally realized they weren't in immediate danger. The rest of the squad kept their weapons raised regardless; terroristas had a habit of hiding amongst those fleeing from the fighting.

A military transport of similar design to the air-ambulances dropped down towards the road that ran parallel to the top of the embankment.

'Kellogg said you'd run off in the middle of a fucking combat zone!' Karen shouted at him. 'I mean, what the fuck was going through your head‌'

Nathan found he couldn't frame an answer, so he remained mute as she tugged him towards the steps, and the beckoning lights of the transport waiting above.

#

Several minutes and a dozen kilometres later, the same transport dropped down towards a camp that spilled out along the streets lining both sides of Third Canal. Smoke rose from clusters of tents and prefabs where a sea of refugees warded off the freezing cold by burning furniture and anything else combustible. These were the lucky ones, awaiting immediate evacuation; in the surrounding city, there were tens of thousands dying more slowly of starvation or freezing inside their homes.

The transport's lights picked out the landing pad on the roof of the clinic and began to drop towards it. Nathan glanced out of a window and saw in the distance the great flickering wall of energy that delineated the nearest perimeter of the coreship's human-habitable zone. Closer to hand loomed the black shape of one of the sky-pillars, a great, carved rock limb that was only one of hundreds supporting the coreship's outer crust.

#

'Hey. Nathan, you stupid bastard. Wake up. It's me. Karen.'

Within minutes of disembarking from the ambulance, he'd crawled on top of a spare trolley in the clinic, and passed out. He groaned and sat up, blinking in the harsh lights and rubbing at a sore spot on his arm.

Karen regarded him with a mixture of scorn and pity. She'd taken off her helmet and matte-black body armour and let her hair fall down to her shoulders. One of the doctors stood next to her, a dark-skinned woman in disposable paper clothing.

The clinic, unlike almost anywhere else currently in Ascension, was warm. The doctor leaned in towards Nathan and pulled one of his eyelids up, shining a bright light directly into his pupil.

'Seems okay,' she remarked, her voice brisk. She then took out a hypo and aimed it towards Nathan's arm, almost before he realized what she was doing.

'Hey!' he shouted, sliding off the trolley and out of her immediate reach.

The two women stared at him with almost identical expressions of exasperation.

'For God's sake, Nathan,' said Karen. 'Doctor Nirav is trying to help you.'

'Thanks, but I don't need any shots.'

'What, you fucking phobic or something‌?' she replied in a voice full of scorn.

'Command think Peralta's got his hands on some kind of nerve agent,' explained Nirav. 'That means everyone gets a shot, and we also take a blood and DNA sample at the same time. Everyone has to do it, no exceptions.'

Nathan glanced warily towards the doctor. 'Forget it. No samples of any kind, either.'

'Why the fuck not‌?' asked Karen.

'Sorry,' said the doctor, patting a pocket. 'Got that already while you were out cold. So how about you stop whining and take the shot now, so I don't have to get some of the guys from security to come here and hold you down while I give it to you anyway‌?'

He hesitated, and even thought about making a run for it and taking his chances outside before they could identify him from his DNA sample. But where could he go‌ His work as a medic had given him a sobering overview of just how bad things were in the city; outside lay only a cold and hungry death.

Instead he nodded, and Nirav pressed something cold against his neck. There was a hiss and a sudden jolt of pressure against his skin, and then it was over.

A block of ice immediately settled into the pit of his stomach. It had only ever really been a matter of time before they worked out who he was, and there was literally nowhere he could run.

As Nirav departed, Karen folded her arms and studied him with a mixture of motherly concern and mild contempt. 'To be honest, Nathan, after the way you ran off back there, I was worried maybe you'd caught a whiff of that nerve gas and gone crazy. Who was it you said you saw‌?'

Nathan shook his head. 'I made a mistake.'

She sighed and reached out to tug him closer to her. 'How awake are you‌?'

'Not very.'

She shook her head. 'Not the right answer,' she said, pushing a hand through his hair. 'It's been a long day, Nathan. Let's go back to my place.'

#

What Karen called 'her place' was a room in a commandeered administrative block on the other side of the main refugee camp. She had cleared it of most of its remaining furniture, whatever hadn't already been burned or looted, and had installed a spare cot from the clinic. Technically this was against the rules, but nobody seemed to care enough to enforce them. The illicit arrangement did have the advantage of giving her and Nathan some privacy.

A small portable heater glowed in the dark nearby, illuminating Karen's warm lithe body from behind her. Nathan slid his hands around her waist, then moved them up to cup her small breasts. Her tongue felt wet and salty as it licked against his lips. He felt himself stiffen, a wave of sudden, needful ardour washing over him.

She grinned and slithered expertly on top of him, quickly sliding him inside her. She was already wet. Her hands pressed down hard on his chest, the sensation almost painful, then she began to move, her hips grinding slowly.

Even the building's basement generators, augmented by their tiny heater unit, could not together quite keep the cold out, and soon he shivered, his skin prickling in the frigid air. He thought of the bodies he'd seen floating along the canal, picked out by the rover's unforgiving searchlights, and felt his ardour begin to fade.

'I'm not sure I can,' he muttered, and felt a sudden wave of fatigue wash over him. It had been, as she had said, a long day. 'Maybe we should try and get some sleep.'

'Shut up,' she said, her voice ragged, hands pressing ever more forcefully against his chest. 'Don't disobey the orders of a superior officer.'

I'm not in your fucking army, he thought. But he dutifully held on to her plump thighs and banished those images of death and decay from his mind, concentrating instead on the tumble of her hair across her shoulders and the moistness of her lips when she leaned down to kiss him. To his surprise it worked, and he listened to the increasing hoarseness of her breath just before she climaxed and came to a gasping halt. Her head tipped back, before she finally collapsed against his chest.

'Oh fuck, I needed that,' she moaned.

'You're welcome,' Nathan muttered. He glanced towards the window, where he could see the underside of a sky glowing a dull red.

Karen slid back down beside him and lay there for a few moments, her head resting on his shoulder. He sensed something else was on her mind and, after a few minutes of silence, she pushed herself up on one elbow and stared down at him.

'So who was she‌' she asked, regarding him with a serious intensity.

Nathan gazed at her blankly until he realized she meant Ilsa. 'What makes you think I was looking for a she‌?'

'Intuition.' Karen's expression softened a little and she smiled. 'I'm not saying you have to answer. I'm just curious.'

'Does it matter‌?'

'You know, Nathan, it doesn't take a genius to guess you're hiding something.' She rolled on to her back beside him and sighed. 'I guess there's never going to be a good time to tell you this.'

'Tell me what‌?'

'I'm being reassigned. They're sending several new expeditions into the rest of the coreship, and I've been asked to join one. We might even try to penetrate the command core this time round. It'll be a joint operation, undertaken with the surviving Skelites and Bandati in the other zones.'

'What are you hoping to find‌? The coreship is dead.' He'd seen external shots of the starship taken by the Legislate ships that arrived a few weeks after the Shoal had abandoned it. Almost all its drive-spines had been burned away as it escaped Night's End. Early hopes of finding a way to pilot it back to Consortium territory had been quickly dashed, but contact had now been made with races in the other environments, including one or two previously unknown to mankind.

Karen frowned. 'You understand what I'm saying, don't you‌?'

Nathan smiled and stroked her hair for what he guessed would likely be the last time. 'That we won't be seeing each other any more, is that it‌?'

'I wasn't sure how you'd react.'

'I think we both always knew a day like this was coming.' He looked inside himself and realized he wasn't lying. Life had been grim, desperately so for too long now, and their time together had helped keep him sane. 'No more chasing after General Peralta, then,' he added. 'You must be relieved.'

She scowled. 'Peralta's a dead man. He's never leaving Ascension alive. He must know it too, but he just keeps fighting.'

Nathan found himself wondering what she might think if she were to find out he had briefly been in Peralta's employ, and until a few months before. The warlord, faced with a stark choice between arrest and execution on the one hand and a slow, lingering death on the other, had demanded safe transportation off the coreship for himself and his inner circle, almost as soon as the first relief operations had arrived. The Consortium had other ideas, however, and Peralta had then made good on his threat to carry out attacks on refugees until he got exactly what he wanted.

Ilsa had been amongst the first to slip away from Peralta's compound under cover of night, and ever since he had made his own escape a few months later, he had been searching for her so they could find a way out of Ascension together. He had hoped his volunteer work on the ambulances would improve their chances of being lifted out of the coreship, once he'd found her.

'Unless he can find a way to mix in with the rest of the refugees, and slip past you,' Nathan suggested. He was careful to keep his voice casual.

'They scan everyone who goes through,' she replied, and yawned, pulling herself in closer to him. 'With DNA profiling, biometrics, the works. Don't you worry, there's no way in hell anyone gets on to a ship without us knowing exactly who they are.'

'That's good to know,' he muttered, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if Nirav had yet checked his DNA profile against the Legislate's security databases.

#

'Hey. Wake up.'

Nathan grumbled and shook his head, opening bleary eyes. He could tell it was dawn because the light outside the window was now marginally brighter than during the night. Karen was already sitting up, the thick grey blanket pulled up around her naked breasts.

Two men stood by the open door to the office, dressed the same as any other troopers except for the grey shoulder markings that identified them as internal security. They were armed with pulse-rifles.

'Ma'am,' one of them said to Karen, throwing her a salute but unable to hide the smirk on his face. 'Sorry to wake you, but we've got orders.'

'What goddamn orders‌' she snapped.

Nathan glanced down towards Karen's pistol, still in its holster and half-hidden under her tangled clothes, and decided his chances of surviving a shoot-out were minimal in the extreme.

'We're here to take Mr Whitecloud into custody,' said the trooper who'd spoken. 'The orders came from Representative Munn. You'll see they're marked highest priority.' He passed the credentials to her.

She scanned the papers for a moment before looking back up. 'Ty Whitecloud?' she asked, looking utterly confused. 'Who the hell is Ty Whitecloud‌?'

'He is, ma'am,' the trooper replied, nodding towards the man who had been calling himself Nathan Driscoll.

Karen turned to stare at him like she'd never set eyes on him before.

An Appreciation For Cheap Electric Toothbrushes

This fits into the category of 'where they always there, or did I just notice them because I've been away for a while?' Not those big expensive ones, the cheap three quid disposable ones with a pre-installed battery. Nice idea, so naturally I got one.

Talking of healthy pursuits, I've set my workplace up now we're back in my old flat. One new Galant desk, and one second-hand Aeron chair. I'll freely admit I nicked the idea of getting one of these from reading Charlie Stross's blog a few years back and, like him, I managed to find one cheap on Ebay - only £200, as opposed to the £900 or so I'd have to pay if I bought one new. And it is very, very, very comfortable.

Serendipity, in the guise of stumbling across a related newspaper article by A.L. Kennedy, where she talks about the relationship between a career in writing and a tendency towards back problems (although my own problems, I think, were more the result of several years working as a graphic designer, where a combination of cheap chairs and daily scruff-of-the-neck deadlines did the most damage).

SF moribund, my arse.

I sense a certain overly familiar and negative meme arising once more in the wake of this recent Mind Meld article on various author's pick of their top ten. The ire it seems to have caused in one or two small corners of the netverse (here) is reminiscent of similar arguments (here, to which Adam Roberts response in the comments 'Mark, Mark, Mark. So young, so promising, so full of Wrongness' seems almost deliriously apposite). But in this case, the exasperation seemingly arises from the fact many of the works cited are older rather than newer.

What should be remembered is that those books that most fulfill SF Signal's request are almost by definition those read by the contributors at a formative period in their lives, almost certainly the early teens; that these works should then be cited is hardly surprising, and certainly not an indication that sf is somehow in a 'moribund' state.

Consider also that outside of our relatively young genre is a body of literature spanning millennia, and that many works cited as 'classics' outside of our particular field of interest come from a period spanning the 17th to 20th Centuries. I don't see anyone slagging off those particular works as somehow making literature 'moribund' simply by means of their age. Rather, these are books that have stood the test of time, and this is essentially the question SF Signal were asking in their Mind Meld piece.

You want some examples of modern, highly influential, sf-as-burning-cauldron-of-groundbreaking-creativity? Just off the top of my head without even peeking at the bookshelves behind my head, I can think of -

Paolo Bacigalupi: author of The Windup Girl. Hitting 'year's best' or 'decade's best' lists right, left and centre, and justifiably so. Hardly anyone else is dealing seriously with rapid environmental change and the possibility of a worldwide fuel crisis in their fiction.

Cory Doctorow: how can you all forget Cory? His Little Brother is absolutely one of the best books I've read in the past ten years, period. It might be distinctly borderline in the sf sense, but so are a number of classic volumes produced by previous generations of sf writers.

Walter Jon Williams: recently published Implied Spaces & This Is Not A Game. The former takes notions of posthumanism and the singularity and combines them into a brilliant, ludic, almost old-school piece of entertainment. Absolutely superb, as is This Is Not A Game, which is so freaking current and 'now' it's almost ridiculous.

Robert Charles Wilson, author of Spin: More old-school, but out in just the last few years, this justifiably reaped some hefty awards.

Simon Ings: an Eighties Interzone-era author, he's probably the least 'current' of the lot and hasn't published any sf in several years, but in my opinion if you haven't read Ings, you haven't read sf. Few authors have pushed the envelope in the way this particular author has. You haven't read him? Here's some hints: Amazon. Book Depository. Alibris.

Iain Banks: author of...oh, you know. Zillions of books. He's mentioned in the Mind Meld by a couple of authors, but he's hardly an example of sf being moribund, is he? Rather the opposite, I'd say; more like one of our leading cheerleaders.

Chris Beckett: author of The Holy Machine, about to be republished by Corvus. Chris to me reads like a 21st Century take on early Chris Priest, core sf ideas filtered through a discerning eye for characterisation with a distinct 'literary' bent.

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash, Anathem, Diamond Age, etc, etc... I mean, come on.

Lucius Shepard: one of our most brilliant stylists, as well as works of fantasy he's produced a quantity of near-future and not-so-near future sf that's been enormously influential.

I could go on and on, I really could. Some are young, some not so young. All (with one exception) are current, working writers contributing to the evolution of the field. All are brilliant. Many sell copious quantities of books.

Let's kill this stupid 'moribund' meme right now before it gets any more irritating.

Back from Sci Fi London

Back from Sci Fi London, which proved interesting, if something of a flying visit. Someone recorded me  blithering on some probably incomprehensible nonsense about the future of publishing for a podcast to be put online at some indeterminate point. Frankly, I'm bushed after all that traveling and flying.

I was only down as a last-minute shoe-in and, I suspect, a replacement for another Tor author who couldn't make it down, but given the short notice and my only recent return to these shores, that's far from surprising. But the panel on the future of publishing proved to be entertaining, and I had the opportunity to finally meet Paul Graham-Raven, renew my passing acquaintance with Tom Hunter, organiser of the Clarke Awards (whom I last spoke to, as I recall, at the 2005 Worldcon), and also meet the editor of SFX magazine.

I also ran into Gary Erskine the comic artist, who worked in Borders books in Glasgow at just about the same time I did. I think he was mildly flabbergasted to find out I'd managed to publish about five books since I'd last spoken to him.

Mainly I was down to take part in a panel and then do a 'coffee with..' event, but when you discount the publisher's representatives and what I suspect were a couple of journalists from the audience, you're left with maybe, er, ten people for us to talk to. As for the 'coffee with...', it wasn't exactly crowded, shall we say, but I did end up having a rather fascinating conversation with a film director of European provenance - it is primarily a film festival, after all. I'm thinking it's about time me and some other of my fellow authors of the fantastic north of the border put together something of our own again. We've done it in the past, and it's generally proven successful. We shall se.

Sci Fi London

Still busy as hell. Got freelance editing-type work to do and getting things sorted out back in my old flat has become enough of a nearly-full-time occupation that there are times (I joke, but only half-joke) it feels like I'm beginning to forget what the book I'm working on is even about.

But I do at least have the time to say I'll be taking part in Sci Fi London (really not sure about that name) this Saturday at the Piccadilly Apollo; specifically, I'll be taking part in a panel on Future Publishing (ebooks, in other words). After that, there's a chance to have, er, coffee with me at 3pm - I'm slotted in between 'coffee with Adrian Tchaikovsky' and 'coffee with Tony Ballantyne' in which you 'get the chance to have a coffee with some leading lights in SF and Fantasy writing' according to this here web page. I think this is what they call a kaffeeklatsch in SF conventions, but if so it's the first time I've ever taken part in one.

I'm really not sure precisely what the whole 'coffee with...' thing is going to entail, or if anyone's even actually going to turn up; it's a little like a signing session in that you've no idea exactly how it's going to work out. I've never been inclined towards the idea of taking part in a signing session because I've heard too many stories from other authors of sitting around and feeling like a complete lemon when no one comes. Or else they sit in a row of several other authors, all with long, winding queues, but no one in front of their own table.

Not that I've ever been asked to do a signing session, mind you. But I remember seeing Neal Stephenson when his book tour for Cryptonomicon came to Glasgow xxx years back, and if a Big Giant Head like Stephenson who was by this point already a bit of a legend in his own lunchtime can attract only twenty or so people to come hear him speak, then surely there's not much point in the rest of us really bothering. But that, of course, is being typically Scottish (ie defeatist) so for the moment I'll assume it's going to be a glorious merging of wits and intellect in an undoubtedly deeply profound discussion of, er, something or else.

Anyhoo, the other thing I'm taking part in (as I say) is the Future Publishing panel at 1pm this Saturday along with, amongst others, Tom Hunter and Paul Graham-Raven. Kindles, Ipads, the end of traditional publishing and all that jazz. I took part in a similar panel at Eastercon this year, which was enormous fun, I must say. I can be an opinionated git at the best of times, but the elephant in the room on that particular occasion was DRM. If there's one thing that surprised me coming away from that con, it was the number of editors and publishers apparently in favour of DRM to an extent that surprised me. If there's one thing that has me going off on a rant, it's DRM.

Shit, I'm going to have to bone up on this stuff now. Did I ever tell you I have nightmares of taking part in an ebook panel and suddenly spotting Cory Doctorow in the audience looking at me in disappointment and slowly shaking his head? Too much information? Oh well, too late now...

waving, not drowning

Okay - just a quick note to let you all know that I am in fact still out there somewhere. I'm now back (along with my other half Emma naturally) in the UK, and back in my old flat in Glasgow (I must admit that on occasion when I venture out into the bleak winter streets I wonder if leaving Taipei was the best idea I ever had, but on the other side of the coin it gets so hot and humid over there it can be just as bad). If I have any other regret, it's that things here in the UK now strike me as being exorbitantly expensive. That's not just relativism - they really are far, far too expensive.

Since February, when I wrote my last entry here, I've been either packing to move to Glasgow or unpacking on arrival. My old flat is in a state of disrepair, and I'm working on getting that sorted out. Between renovation, some part-time manuscript assessment for an agency and working on Final Days, I'm currently getting very little time to do anything like blogging - or else I'm too exhausted. Things will resume, but only once I have the energy - any time between now and the beginning of July, basically.

I did however manage to make it along to Eastercon in London at the Radisson, met my editor for the first time and so forth. It was good to catch up with an awful lot of people I've missed seeing over the past few years. Anyway, onwards and upwards with the work; regular blogging, as I say, should resume at about the same time I don't have anything left to fix in this house.

Macbook

So this week I got myself a shiny new Macbook and it is, indeed, very, very shiny. That leaves me with two other, older macs to get rid of before I go home. One is my ibook, purchased a couple of years back, as a cheap refurb from a UK company. The other is a Mac Mini of similar vintage (mid-2000's). Both have served me extremely well, and the ibook has had at least two books written on it.

The Mac Mini, however, has been effectively gathering dust for the past two years, so it's time to sell it. The ibook is going to Emma's sister down south in Tainan (we're off down there tomorrow for a couple of days over Chinese New Year). As good as it's been, it was just starting to get a bit slow for running stuff like Scrivener, the writing software I've been addicted to the past couple of years. The Macbook is clearly an astonishing piece of kit. It's a refurb too, which I should maybe explain for the benefit of those who don't know.

When a computer is sold to someone and turns out to have any kind of problem, it goes back to Apple. I believe they also have a 'cooling off' period for their machines by which you can return them within 14 days if you change your mind. The point is, that if there is a problem, it's usually something very minor, like a faulty battery. All they need to do is swap it out and the machine is quite literally as good as new.

Except none of these machines can be sold as legally new items, so they're sold as 'refurbs'. They also go through a testing process a second time. Now, in the States, where Apple is based, Macbooks of the type I have go for $1000 (£600 or thereabouts). In the UK, they're about £800. Here in Taiwan, it works out at about £700. So given that I got the equivalent of £100 off the cost of a locally-purchased machine, that's a saving of £200 over the UK Apple stores.

Which is nice. Especially when you consider that it's a tax-deductible work expense. And OMG, it plays full-screen HD-quality streaming video...!

But of course I'm much too busy writing to bother with all that. Of course.