Where I’m at

Once upon a time there was a young man with the twin ambitions, not incompatible, of making it big in publishing and becoming a successful writer. How did he do?

Well, the publishing happened, for a good few years. It didn’t take him long to discover that the bits he enjoyed most were editorial work and hands-on production. The bits that are actually more necessary, from a business model point of view – acquisitions, marketing, royalties, accounts in general, strategy – tended to leave him cold. His ambition to grease his way up any of those particular poles was therefore limited from the start, which led to a career of middling editorial sort of work – books, journals, more books, more journals, more books and oh, a magazine –culminating in the creation and liquidation of his own company. After that he rather felt he had had his fun in publishing and looked around for something with a compatible skillset requirement. Thus he found himself working in communications for a large computer network, which via a stroke-of-the-pen-change to marketing lasted for seven years – the longest this once aspiring publisher had held down any job. Redundancy struck – for the first time in a nearly quarter of a century career, which face it, isn’t bad – and cast him out into the world as an aspiring freelance technical writer, with the understanding that his former employers would be providing about a quarter of his work. No one told that to the marketing drone who replaced him and he was chronically underused, so more by chance than anything else he found himself employed fulltime once more as technical author for a firm that manufactures scientific instruments. His job title is now Communications Executive and to his huge surprise he has ended up in charge of advertisements, amongst other stuff, despite never having bought anything based on an advertisement in his life.

No, it isn’t where he saw himself 25 years ago. But it pays the bills and it leaves time for the other.

Stop sniggering, I do of course mean the writing. What happened there?

Well, it all went swimmingly at first. The writing was very specifically science fiction – okay, and fantasy if pushed, but sf most of all. That was 90% of his reading so it was going to be his writing too. Stories were sprayed at Interzone and other outlets - but mostly Interzone - until a few stuck. An agent was acquired, novels were written and even sold. Four in total. And then?

Well, that company that I, I mean he … I … he … oh, okay, I (you’d guessed, hadn’t you?) founded. It published science fiction. What else was this life-long sf fan going to publish? And it broke the subject. I’ve never been able to work out why. Maybe I looked too closely at what goes on behind the scenes – I saw the wooden supports that hold up the sets and suddenly could no longer suspend the disbelief. I can still read it but the drive to write it had just gone.

There again it’s possible I had just told all the stories that were bubbling inside me. I wrote a few more pieces, using up the last of the ideas bubbling away in the background, and they continue to bubble on slushpiles on either side of the Atlantic. If a publisher shows interest then I have no doubt my own interest will rekindle. But life is too short for writing on spec, and unless they do get taken up then there won’t be any more like them written for the foreseeable.

And I was introduced to Other Stuff. For a while I became Sebastian Rook, writing the first three of the Vampire Plagues series – Mayan vampires in Victorian London, for readers aged <=12. That was fun, and I could use my genre experience (though I say it myself) to deliver that little extra to the plots. The plot for book 1 came ready made; I made some suggestions that were retrofitted into the series background; I was consulted heavily on the plot for book 2; and for book 3 we all sat down in a room together and hacked the plot out from scratch.

That led – same editor, different publisher – into ghostwriting for a Real Life TV Celebrity, not genre at all. At least, not my usual genre. But genre of a sort, and nicely paying too. Rather like a series of H-bomb tests causing something ancient and terrible beneath the Pacific to stir, this caught the attention of my agent, who had not had a lot to do with my career in the intervening years but whose attention I badly needed to catch.

At his suggestion we are now working on a series of historical adventures, and fingers are crossed as to its success. I have come to the conclusion that every historical writer should be an sf writer first. No one knows they are living in the past. As a rule, everyone lives in the most present and up to date world they have ever known, even if it has standards and mores that are utterly alien to cultures that actually come later. For them this is normality and it must be presented as such, with all the important differences signalled to the reader via some means other than an “As you know, Bob” speech every couple of pages. A 32-gun frigate may seem quaint to us but it’s as exciting as a starship to a young man from the late eighteenth century.

And so that is where I am. By a series of utterly logical steps I am a publisher and science fiction writer who is not currently working in publishing or writing science fiction, and has a lurking suspicion that this is How It Is Meant to Be. At least for now. And really quite happy about it.

Keep watching.

Witney Book Festival: 9 days and counting ...

May I particularly draw your attention to the excellent events of Sunday 19th, though I should add I have never claimed to be the author of 18 novels.

His Majesty’s Starship, part 3: a bloody children's publisher?

Slowly but surely His Majesty’s Starship approached completion ... and approached it ... and approached it. For a very long time indeed I was almost there, with just a couple of thousand words to go, and I simply wasn’t writing them. I self-diagnosed the problem, which was that I had a life and I was unwilling to lose it. The solution was to start getting up earlier, writing before going to work. It’s a habit I’ve kept.

Placing it with a publisher was quite atypically easy. Two friends from my writers group already shared an agent, Robert Kirby. Robert had been sufficiently tickled by their descriptions of the group to ask if he could have first refusal if any of the rest of us ever wrote a novel. I sent His Majesty’s Starship to him in August 1995, shortly before the Glasgow World SF Convention, which was my first worldcon. He finally accepted it, and me as a client, in January 1996. I had an agent! For a while I enjoyed dropping the words ‘my agent’ into conversation with friends, family and strangers.

(I recently came across an old letter from Robert thanking me for introducing him to his latest client, one Alastair Reynolds. Purveyor of retirement plans to agents, that's me. No finder's fee, sadly.)

And then Scholastic expressed an interest in it.

Scholastic?

A bloody children’s publisher?

Robert’s precise reason for sending the book to Scholastic was, and I quote, “Gilmore seemed to me a sort of modern day Biggles and the level of sex and violence would not have raised the collective eyebrow of readers of Captain W.E. Johns.” As Gilmore, in the draft he read, was a divorcee from a group marriage with a teenage son, and there is an alien sex scene in chapter 16, I disputed this point of view, but it’s amazing the effect having a publisher actually express interest will have on you.

Further, I had been put off Scholastic by hearing horror stories from a friend who had had a novel published by their Point SF imprint which was systematically neutered to make it suitable for a young audience. (Or rather, one suspects, for the young audience’s parents.) The approaching middle age, divorced heroine became a teenager. At one point, in the original draft, she comes down first thing in the morning and finds the boyfriend having breakfast, with the implication he had stayed overnight; now he had to walk up the garden path first thing in the morning and ring the bell to be let in.

I don’t know who edited that book but it certainly wasn’t Scholastic’s David Fickling, a boundlessly cheery Roy Hudd lookalike and publishing genius. (All my writing breakthroughs seem to be thanks to someone called David: Fickling, Pringle, Barrett ...) Practically my first card on the table when I met David was that the alien sex scene stayed. “Absolutely,” he said cheerfully. I was to learn he said a lot of things cheerfully, including his careful enumerations of your novel’s precise faults.

David was the man who had signed Philip Pullman (Northern Lights had just won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction) and was looking for something meatier than Scholastic’s usual teen fare for a new imprint. Robert forewarned me that David thought the book was bogged down with too much detail. I went into the meeting determined to refute this viewpoint and I left agreeing with him. I also saw how it took far too long for the story to get going, and it finished too soon – about three quarters of the way through the book, with a lot of mopping up after. I needed to rewrite it so that it ended at, you know, the end.

The kicker was: if David suspected for a moment that I was just agreeing with him to get the book published, rather than rewriting with my heart in it, he wouldn’t be interested. Not that I would have just agreed with him to get it published ... but it concentrated the mind.

This began the first of quite a few rewrites: new opening chapter, throwing us straight into the action and highlighting Gilmore’s tactical ability. A space battle, a few people killed. All good stuff. I sent off the rewrite.

Early 1997: he didn’t like it. I began to see the problem: I had added more plot but left the excess verbiage in as well. David did me a huge favour for life at this point by recommending that I read Patrick O’Brian’s Master & Commander, first of the Aubrey series. O’Brian’s characters just slide into the action: Aubrey has been through some considerable scrapes prior to the novel’s opening and we only hear about these second-hand.

I applied this to the novel and I cut out anything that didn’t directly relate to the action, including (though it broke my heart) chapter 8, in which the Rustie Arm Wild interviews the crew. That chapter was the key one to introducing not only the crew but also the alien mindset to the reader. The novel was now down to 92,000 words, from its first draft of 113,000.
Back to Scholastic, and David courted death with a casual comment along the lines of: “don’t I remember a chapter where Arm Wild interviews the crew? I quite miss that ...”

I restrained my homicidal impulse and learnt the lesson: anything that develops the characters is probably acceptable, even if it doesn’t contribute to the action. The interview was reinstated.
In January 1998 I sent in the final draft at 100,000 words, and it was accepted. And despite all the twists and turns over the last two years, it really was the story I originally wanted to tell.

I was struck by all the pluses of dealing with David, as opposed to the horror stories I had heard of other publishers: incompetent editors who want to be writers themselves and fiddle at every stage; who have no idea of science fiction beyond Star Trek; who bow to the High Priests of Marketing and tell you to put the sex here, the extra 200 pages there, and where’s that dragon when we need it? And all for a product that ultimately will have a life expectancy that makes a mayfly seem pensionable, because that’s how the bookselling system works. (Note: further on and many years later, I still have yet to meet any editors who match this stereotype ... but I was young then and, like it or not, the stereotype exists.)

I was bowled over by an editor who encouraged me to cut. Not willy-nilly, but surgically. Cut this, yes, but expand that, because you leave off just when the reader’s getting interested ... you see? And yes, I did see. David never lifted a finger to fiddle with the science fiction – that was entirely my own. He just concentrated on the story, and I came out the other end of the process a convert to the demands of children’s publishing: proper children’s publishing, not plot lobotomy as is sometimes practised. Just tell the story, then stop. That’s it. No more. Let it be as long as it needs to be. And you end with a story to be proud of: the story you wanted to tell.

I still had to stay on my toes. There were those within the Scholastic empire who clung to the old ways and David couldn’t control everything. Like, a frowning copy editor changed one character’s “Sod it!” to “Damn it!” We compromised on “Nuts!” (I had a vision of the guy wandering the corridors of their offices in New Commonwealth House muttering “Sod it / damn it / nuts / sod it / damn it / nuts ...”, perhaps looking to see which of his colleagues swooned at what.) Strangely, the occasional utterance of “Christ!” caused no upset at all; a sad reflection etc. etc.

The learning experience continued right up until the end. At proof stage, I was told it was one signature too long for its price range. Books are typically printed in multiples of sixteen pages – eight pages get printed on either side of a large sheet of paper which is then folded and trimmed. That is a signature. My choice was: cut it by sixteen pages, or let Scholastic put it up by a pound. I cut the sixteen pages. It’s humiliating to realise your book has sixteen dispensable pages in it, but it was an invaluable exercise.

His Majesty’s Starship was published in December 1998. My author copies were delivered while I was at work on the last working day before Christmas, so I had to go and collect them from the depot. As I drove away from the depot, with the holidays ahead and my first novel in the boot of my car, the radio announced that Peter Mandelson had resigned from the cabinet. And then it played the third part of Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite, a piece of music I really enjoy with a triumphant trumpet fanfare.

I was pretty pleased with myself and with life generally.

Still am.

Life goes on …

It enjoyed modest success and some fairly nice reviews: I still relish the tingle when I saw SFX had awarded it more stars than the other book on the same page, a Star Trek: Voyager novel. It went out of print in 2002. A few years later I did a print-on-demand version because I was still getting a trickle of enquiries. And then, last year, I heard Cheryl was starting a new e-book publishing company ...

His Majesty’s Starship, part 2: B5, bad guys and by golly, a sequel

Like me, Babylon 5 was also on a mission to do right what Star Trek got wrong. Its key innovation was the story arc – the idea of an overall plot across the entire series that would take many episodes to unfold. Nowadays it’s almost unknown for a series not to have an arc. Babylon 5 gave us a universe of consequences – if a character broke a leg in one episode, they were on crutches in the next. In one episode a fighter pilot was killed and the closing shot was of Commander Sinclair composing a letter of condolence to the next of kin. Humans in Babylon 5 were a minority species, one among many, as opposed to the apartheid-like setup of Trek in which humans are clearly the minority yet equally clearly in charge of almost everything. It was a universe where it was okay to be religious, without the right-minded good guys on the one hand ‘respecting’ your faith until their hearts bled and on the other quite obviously despising it as primitive superstition.

None of it was actually original in comparison to written science fiction, which had grasped all these innovations in the fifties or earlier. For television science fiction it was brand new and I felt a lot of moral support.

Babylon 5 also gave us a feisty Jewish-Russian female second-in-command; not a combination of features you would expect to be duplicated easily. Well, I got there first! Hah!

I enjoyed dividing the Earth into the political map of 2148, including such nations as the Confederation of South-East Asia, the Pacific Consortium, the Holy Arab Union, the South American Combine and the United Slavic Federation – and of course the Vatican. Then, once I had the entire planet neatly divided into political entities, I suddenly realised to my horror that I was doing what Trekkies do – I was neatly delimiting and parcelling up a potentially fascinating future to make it manageable. So the published version names a few nations, but many more are now implied.

Books need antagonists and it would have been too easy to make the Rusties the bad guys. In fact their invitation to the nations of Earth was pretty straight, for the amount of information they chose to reveal. So, the tension had to come from within the humans. For the baddies I chose the Confederation of South East Asia. This was a superstate India and its puppet satellite states; Pakistan, Bangladesh (I take credit for the first ever Bangladeshi on a starship, I think), Afghanistan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Burma. I really should add I had and have nothing against India – but the baddy had to be a global superpower of 2148, and I have no doubt that India will be one. Europe and North America will have long had their day by then. Whether India is a good or a bad superpower, only time will tell. In His Majesty’s Starship it’s just emerging from a mad and bad period, and there’s a tension between different factions who have different views of the past. Several of the Confederation characters are perfectly decent guys who just happen to have been born into this situation and so I gave the Confederation the NVN, an equivalent of the Waffen SS, who unquestionably are bad and not necessarily well liked by their compatriots. As I don’t speak a word of Hindi, NVN stands for ‘Not Very Nice’. NVN uniforms were plain green, based on the pyjamas I was wearing at the time. Depending which part of the novel you read, the uniforms are either dark or pale green, which has two possible explanations: dark green for dress uniform, pale for combat (or vice versa); or, they left the dark uniforms in the wash too long.

Then I unexpectedly started thinking of a sequel …

I honestly hadn’t intended to. But I showed some chapters at Milford 1994 in Rothbury, Northumberland and they came up with two unforeseen reactions. First, I explained the background plot and an immediate reaction was: that’s what the aliens want, and we’re the best they can do?! And second, a criticism was made that Gilmore was a bit bland. He needed more background. He needed a family! Thus his eighteen-year-old son Joel was generated spontaneously from the ether, together with a perfect rationale for the Rusties’ actions, and these two things together gave me enough material to write The Xenocide Mission: the only sequel I have written so far.

In part 3: finding a publisher and discovering I'm a children's author.

His Majesty’s Starship, part 1: origins

The lovely Cheryl tells me His Majesty’s Starship and Jeapes Japes are available in the Wizard’s Tower book store. They’re out there! EPUB and Kindle! £4.99 each! Buy them!

All of which inspires me to reminisce. In the best spirit of present-day science fiction I shall do it in three parts.

When I was young I read Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast. This proved upon retrospect, and indeed upon actually doing it, to be a bad idea because it’s terrible and I couldn’t believe it had been perpetrated by the same author as my beloved Starman Jones, which I read and re-read compulsively up to the age of about 13. However, there is a very brief mention in it of a Royal Space Force. That was an image that hung around in my mind for a long time after, but I didn’t just want to fling it straight into a story as a given. I wanted to know how such a thing had come about.

Also, much as I love good ol’fashioned space opera, with space battles and hyperspace jumps and lasers, I grew up on much more plausible Arthur C. Clarke-type spaceship stories, where there is no artificial gravity and ships must obey the laws of physics. I wanted to write a story that could start in a Clarke-type universe and plausibly end with whizz-bang-splody ships.

In my twenties, I read Hornblower. I had dipped into this before but now at a stroke I now read the entire series. I was struck by an aspect of Hornblower that eluded me as a child: his self-loathing. He is a hero and can never believe it. Every mission he undertakes he is convinced will be his last – and this at a time when the English had shot Admiral Byng on his own quarterdeck for messing up. That was my hero!

I almost had a novel. I didn’t know back then that the phrase ‘Hornblower in space’ was already fast becoming a cliché; I only had a vague idea who Honor Harrington was and David Feintuch’s Hope series had yet to be published. It probably wouldn’t have been a problem if I had, though, because both those others are set well after the start of their respective eras. I however wanted to cover the beginning. For example, why exactly would anyone want to arm a spaceship?

I also wanted to bring the limitations of nineteenth century naval warfare to space, as I think the principles will be pretty similar if it ever happens. In Hornblower’s day, ships were big and slow and couldn’t hide. If you were doing five knots and your enemy came over the horizon doing five and a half, then sooner or later there would be a battle, but you could spend all day just looking at your enemy as he crept closer and closer without being able to do a thing about it. There was nowhere to run to, and when the fighting started you just sat there and took it. And so, these principles were applied to the big space battle in the novel, when it came.

Mix ’em all together and I had my background.

In Asimov’s Foundation trilogy there is a throwaway line about Gilmer, the man who sacked the Imperial capital Trantor and brought down the remains of the Empire. This led to a vague resolution as a teenager, filed away at the back of my mind next to the Royal Space Force, that I would one day chronicle the future history of the Gilmer family. To kick them off, my depressive spaceship captain was named Gilmore. Michael Gilmore, because I’ve always liked Michael as a name: I’ve never met a Michael I didn’t like.

I kicked back against Hornblower’s depressive excesses. He never really accepts that actually he’s quite good and his self-pity becomes actively annoying to the reader. Thus by the end of the story Gilmore has good reason to believe he’s actually quite good at what he does.

Never assume an author is putting himself into his characters, but Gilmore’s lack of self-belief certainly mirrored part of my own personality. I began to write His Majesty’s Starship in 1993; I was still in my late twenties and had no idea what the future might hold. I had no idea if I would ever be called upon to lead a large body of people, or even a small one. I did know I didn’t fancy the idea in the slightest because I had no confidence that I could. And so far in my life, I’ve managed to remain a lone wolf.

And the required jump to a Trek-type universe by the end? Okay, I begged the question here: aliens, already technologically advanced, come to Earth with an invitation to the human race to help them develop a world they have available. I called them the First Breed, for reasons which become apparent; the humans nickname them the Rusties. When someone in my writers group said ‘First Breed’ sounded vaguely threatening, hinting at ideas of racial supremacy, I knew I was doing this right.

It took a while to finalise their physical form. At first I played around with all kinds of shapes in my mind but they all came back to the ‘man in a rubber suit’ syndrome; I could take them about as seriously as I could take Trek’s alien of the week. I certainly wasn’t thinking of them as non-human. Then I remembered the Hefn of Judith Moffett’s wonderful (and underrated) Ragged World (tales of the Hefn on Earth - geddit?) series, who are as at home on four feet as they are on two. I put the Rusties on all fours and, voila, aliens!

This also helped me right a grievous wrong that was perpetrated upon science fiction in the early nineties. There was an especially irritating story in Asimov’s called ‘The Nutcracker Coup’. Quite apart from being nauseously cute and upholding the right of all decent Americans to interfere in the affairs of less developed planets if they find the culture un-American or even if they are just plain bored, it featured a four legged intelligent race which – and I gaped with astonishment when I read it – still carried things about in its front legs, so that if one of them was holding a gun on you, say, it hobbled along on three legs while it kept you covered. An interesting take on evolutionary theory, I thought. How would these creatures ever invent the gun? Or any human-type tool that effectively disabled an entire limb if it was going to be used?

Thus, my Rusties had grasping tentacles on either side of their heads which they used the same way we humans used hands. Other things about them just came off the top of my own head. Rusties appear to human eyes to be flaking rust, hence the name (first I actually wanted them to be sweating iron oxide, but my biochemistry isn’t up to it), and when they are conversing face to face, humans have to fight the urge to pick the flakes off the alien’s skin. A Rustie’s nostrils are at the top of its domed head, above the eyes – they come from a relatively predator-free stock that evolved on the plains, so need to keep their airways free of dust and dirt – and thus humans tend to make eye contact with the alien’s nose. They communicate very much by body language, managing to transmit whole concepts in an instant with a gesture or a scent that would take a human much longer to say out loud; this meant I had to find a way of writing down a Rustie conversation from a Rustie’s point of view. And they are herd animals, which is very important.

Finally, the ship itself: His Majesty's Starship, HMSS Ark Royal. This was originally Raptor, a pun on Trek’s Bird of Prey, until I decided that the UK probably would call its first starship Ark Royal – and anyway, it pushed up the word count.

Much too much of my motivation for His Majesty’s Starship was wanting to do right what Star Trek did wrong; like, emphasising that my ship's have seatbelts and depressurise during battles. At the time, Star Trek was the only viable space-based series on television, other than repeats of the original Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – both of which could only be loved for their classic cheese status. But then, in 1994, a few thousand words into the first draft of His Majesty’s Starship, Babylon 5 hit our screens and changed everything.

To be continued ...

How to steal like an artist

My friend Dave asked for my thoughts on How To Steal Like an Artist, so I may as well share them with the rest of the world too. He's talking about creativity generally; I take a specifically writer's views.

1. Yup.
   
   
2. Indeed - this is part of your becoming. Having an idea helps, however, to give drive and focus to your creativity. Knowing who you are feeds into your creativity and vice versa.
   
   
3. Depends. Sometimes there's a contractual obligation. However, let's assume this is about starting out as a writer, so it's probably true. However, having written what you like, go back and check it isn't just fan fiction. Sometimes you have to drown your kittens.
   
   
4. YMMV. This works for him; I know for a fact it wouldn't for me.
   
   
5. Yes, even when you feel they're crowding into what you really want to do, i.e. be creative.
   
   
6. Get a good publisher with a publicity department. You should be free to spend your energy on creating.
   
   
7. Well, yes. Not sure why this makes the top 10 - it's a bit like saying we live on a world with gravity.
   
   
8. Oh yes. Oh yes! Don't be afraid of making mistakes, because if they're typical newbie ones then people will people will move on. But if you enter the realms of total epic jerkness, people will remember. Oh yes. See http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html
   
   
9. Also true. This is why I get so irritated with people banging on about not wanting to have a boring 9-5 job when in fact they've never tried it.The boring 9-5 job gives you stability and subsidises the important stuff you do with the rest of your time. All the other things he mentions are true too.
   
   
10. Also true. Make your audience do some imagining rather than spell it out for them - it will be better than anything you write. Cf. the entire career of Anne McCaffrey after the mid-80s.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I’ve just finished reading a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by Claire Harman. Hmm. Interesting man, interesting life.

It’s also interesting to compare the life of a writer then and now – the similarities and the differences. The similarities: you can work for 10 or 20 years to be an overnight success. Stevenson was made famous by Treasure Island, and then went stellar with Jekyll & Hyde, but he had been writing for over 10 years when Treasure Island was written for serialisation in a magazine, earning a decent wage for a while but not creating much of a splash. It then sat in a drawer for two years until a friend had the idea of pushing it as a book to a publisher. Yup, I can sympathise with that.

The differences: the fact that Jekyll & Hyde could sell 40,000 copies in the UK, which Stevenson knew about, and 250,000 in the US (some legal, some pirated) which he didn’t. Copyright and IP wasn’t quite as vigorous then as now. And the whole publishing world was so much smaller. You get the feeling that it was like science fiction used to be in, say, the 50s – small enough that, in principle, you could read everything that was written.

Another difference, though: any successful author that I know today is organised, plans their plots, pays their tax and national insurance on time, and above all is disciplined in the writing. Stevenson was certainly a disciplined writer, but as for everything else he was vague, woolly minded, useless with money, constantly overflowing with noble dreams and projects which withered on the vine before he had got the first paragraph down. But for a few lucky breaks and an undeniable talent once he actually got writing, he would have been forgotten as yet another wealthy dilettante. This is probably why I would want to slap him if I had ever met him – except that I wouldn’t, because I’m nice and because one good blow would probably have killed him.

I frankly find it amazing that heroes such as Jim Hawkins and David Balfour – steadfast, brave, reliable, exemplary role models of integrity – could be created by someone like Robert Louis Stevenson, who wasn’t any of the above. It shows he was at least aware of the desirability of these virtues. Stevenson was the only son of a successful Scottish engineer, who was the wealthy head of a family firm that specialised in building lighthouses. His general uselessness at related subjects like maths made it clear to everyone, even eventually his reluctant father, that he wouldn’t be following the family trade, so instead he trained as a lawyer, in which after qualifying as an advocate he handled precisely one case, which didn’t even require him to speak and yet he still managed to bungle. The only interest he ever had was in being as writer and that was what he stuck at, living off his parents until eventually he got lucky.

Note that I do not criticise him for being useless at maths and physics, or not being a good lawyer, or even not following in his father’s trade. I do however get immensely fed up with the sense of entitlement shared by Stevenson and far too many wannabe writers that because they are clearly meant to be a writer, the world owes them a favour until such time as the fame kicks in. Like 'eck it does. Get a job, you sponger. There is a poetic justice in that just as he got rich, he started having to support his own generation of parasites – mad wife, lazy stepson, not much less lazy stepdaughter and alcoholic stepson-in-law. Still, at his death he was probably the best known and best selling writer in the world, and to many was considered the best writer, period. That’s quite a hat trick.

To be fair, one thing against his ever settling down and earning a living –had he been so inclined – was that he had to travel constantly to stay alive. He was never well; in fact it’s astonishing that he made it through childhood, where received wisdom was to make a child’s room as hermetically airless as possible, and his mad Scottish nurse filled his head with Wee Free guilt and terrors, and then when this already highly strung child couldn’t sleep would dose him with strong coffee.

By the time he reached adulthood the cold and damp of Edinburgh was killing him. A pattern for over thirty years was that he would leave for a dryer climate, get better, return to Edinburgh and have a relapse. He was only ever really healthy when he settled in the South Pacific in the last ten years of his life, and that is when his life really gets interesting. I find it fascinating that he lived at a time when the world was mostly at peace and a well-off Victorian gentleman could go pretty well anywhere he liked. It is also amazing that in the 1880s and 90s there was already enough of a global communications network that a man could settle in Samoa and conduct a successful literary life, living off the earnings he was making in Europe and America. However, it was a one-way process as he lagged a long way behind what other writers were doing. It meant he was writing into a vacuum and it probably wouldn’t have worked at all if he didn’t have a loyal contingent of friends back home seeing that his stuff got into print. He could fire off manuscripts of all shapes and sizes and subjects with a reasonable expectation that they would still get into print regardless. (Another difference with today’s writers …) Inevitably he became more and more isolated from the contemporary writing scene and it is interesting to speculate whether he could have stayed quite so successful without suddenly dying at the age of 44 and making the matter academic. By the time he was my age, he had been dead for two years.

I must read Weir of Hermiston, which apparently ends mid-sentence because that’s where he put his pen down to take a break on the day he died.

The character I find most admirable in his story is his mother, Margaret. After her husband died when she was in her late fifties, this respectable Edinburgh widow decided to take an extended holiday with her son and his family across the US and then on a yachting cruise around the Pacific. In fact, she liked it so much that she then decided to move fulltime to Samoa. With her piano. Still a respectable widow throughout, photographs show her dressed and looking a bit like Queen Victoria, complete with starched widow’s cap. Go girl!

Conquering the world, one iconic mountain at a time

Last year my good friend Peter went on a Himalayan hiking holiday and had a copy of The New World Order in his backpack as he gazed down on Everest Base Camp.

This year, on behalf of Guildford Town Centre Chaplaincy, he ended up on top of Kilimanjaro. And this time he thought to take a picture of his holiday reading.



Well worth the £20 I sponsored him for.

He points out that I now have until summer 2012 to get another book out, which is when he's hoping to do the Inca trail.

Game plan

Pay attention because I'm going to talk about writing, which I don't often do. At least, not my current writing. Not my actual work in progress stuff.

It weighs on me more with every passing year that there hasn't been a genuine original Ben Jeapes novel published since 2004. And guess what - following yesterday's meeting with my publisher this doesn't look immediately set to change. But there is a renewed sense of purpose in the air, which makes a pleasant change.

I haven't exactly been twiddling my thumbs in the meantime: 3 Vampire Plagues, 2 Midnight Library collections and 3 $INSECT_EATING_TV_GUY ghostwriting gigs bear testimony to this. Time's Chariot was also reissued in 2008, which was nice.

Part of the problem is precisely all that hackwork, which pays bills nicely but gets in the way. I'm happy to be in a position now where I can turn down such offers without regret, unless they pay really well (like $INSECT_EATING_TV_GUY did).

Part of the problem was that when I put the last full stop at the end of New World Order that was the end of the stories that had been burning inside me for years. Thereafter I had to start writing new stuff from scratch rather than just giving voice to pre-existing collections of thoughts. Ideas I can come up with until the cows come home, but plots ... plots! Don't talk to me about plots! Sticking needles in my eyes would be preferable to cudgelling my brains to work out what the £$%& happens next.

So with New World Order out of the way I started on a work which we will call for convenience Untitled Space Opera, or USO. The set-up for USO had been bubbling away for a while but it soon appeared that a satisfactory plot wasn't going to develop, and anyway I had other distractions like getting married and what with one thing and another USO did get finished, after a fashion, but was never really fit for release into the wild. And anyway, in the meantime I had rather gone off space opera so my heart wasn't in it. My heart was in a complete change of direction: taking an old short story of mine, "The Grey People", and stretching it and expanding it backwards and forwards and generally developing in into a novel - a present day urban fantasy set in Salisbury with a present day slightly geeky teenage hero. Called Ted, so call this book Ted1. Even then the plot fairy wasn't entirely beneficent and it did a lot of bouncing back and forth between me and the publisher, who correctly identified a lot of what wasn't working and which lead to a lot of rewriting.

(I mean, a lot. Imagine if Rowling's publishers had said "Well, we like Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone but the Philosopher's Stone bit doesn't really work - can you fix it?" That's the kind of lot I mean. Eventually I had to write up a list of scenes, essentially delete anything with $NON_WORKING_ELEMENT and fill in the gaps with added Plot to make it work better. Which it did.)

It was meant to be standalone but a sequel did suggest itself within the last pages, so while Ted1 moldered with the publisher and in between the hackwork I started on Ted2, which is now almost finished. And guess what, it was meant to be standalone but a sequel is suggesting itself so there could well be a Ted3 and I'll have committed trilogy for the first time. But trilogies are good. Trilogies are sellable. I also want to do another alternate history fantasy which we will call N, possibly because that actually is what I might call it anyway.

Cut a long story short, fast forward to yesterday ...

He likes Ted1. A lot. He also thinks it's such a departure from my current track record with Random House that he could buy it but RH wouldn't really be able to do it justice. In a couple of years he might (for currently undisclosable, but good, reasons) be in a position to do better, but not now.

BUT over the last few years USO has also been bubbling at the back of my mind, and it's had a couple of very useful critiques from friends. I now think it's fixable, and what's more we both agree it's more in line with my other titles.

So, I have a game plan! This is exciting and makes me feel all grown-up.

• Finish Ted2
• Rework USO
• Sit on Ted1 pro tem
• Write N and/or Ted3
• USO gets published
• Teds 1, 2 and possibly 3 are published in short order
• N gets published
  

This all assumes 1 publisher - it would get more complicated if another publisher were to show an interest in a Ted trilogy, which can't be ruled out if my agent cogitates in that direction. You could probably draw a flowchart but for the time being I'll keep it in my head.

So, there we are and here I am. Onwards!

Cathedral no. 3 and Mosque no. 1

Once upon a time I had an interview at Warwick University - which turned out quite well - which meant having to spend the previous night in Coventry. So I had an evening in a new town to myself, and did some wandering around, and came across the two cathedrals - the gleaming new post-war barn and the stone skeleton of the old one next to it, burned out by Luftwaffe incendiary bombs. And as I learned the story of the new cathedral, and how German volunteers helped with the work and how it has developed a worldwide ministry of reconciliation, I fell in love with it and decided I simply had to write a story about it.

It took a few years - had to become a writer, first - but I did write it, and it was awful, thrumming with love and Christianity and general goodness, and for sheer ickiness it broke all known records. Fortunately I could tell it icked and sat on it.

Many years after that, by a miracle, good friend Gus Smith (who writes as Gus Grenfell) suggested a way it could be de-icked, at least a little, and I’m eternally grateful to him for the suggestion, which a character takes up in the last few paragraphs. In fact I would go so far as to say atheist Gus (albeit with a Methodist minister father) came up with a much more Christian solution than I was managing: I love these little ironies. Residual ick may lurk in some sentences but overall it is much, much stronger than it used to be. The story finally got written, and published in Interzone, where it came 46th= in the annual readers’ poll, but what do they know? I called it "Cathedral No. 3", unaware (after three years living in Coventry) that in actual historical fact any new cathedral would be cathedral no. 4.

All this brought to mind by the move afoot in New York to build a mosque near to the Ground Zero site. "Near" is a relative term: one of the comments over at Making Light's take on the story reminds us that in a city anywhere is "near" somewhere else.

Not dismissing for one second the pain felt by those who lost loved ones on 9/11, it's this kind of spirit that always lets society move on and improve upon the past. Whenever dictatorships are replaced with stable democracies, or people of different races accept integration as the norm, or no one cares any longer if you're Protestant or Catholic, it's because people let go of the hurt. Or, failing that, just shut up and don't talk about it and go to their graves bitter and wizened but they keep it to themselves and the poison doesn't leak out into a new generation.

I think a mosque near Ground Zero would be a jolly good idea.

Heroic factasy

I don't read much heroic fantasy, for various reasons. A good one is that it all comes in such fat multi-volume series that I simply don't have the time. But a deeper, slightly more sneaking one is that, well, it's all a bit silly, isn't it? It's not real. Science fiction is generally set in present-day or future societies that could happen. Fantasy is based on past societies that didn't happen, or can't happen, so there.

This isn't entirely fair but it's always there. Good heroic fantasy gets around it by being good. I recently read Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself and enjoyed it a lot: for the characters, the world-building, the humour and the sheer enjoyment of the writing. But still I get this nagging feeling that tells me I should be reading something else, and it isn't at all helped by reading something like Jan Guillou's Templar Trilogy.

Guillou himself is an interesting character - an investigative journalist and spy writer who did time in jail for revealing that the land of cuddly Volvo-driving Abba fans has a secret intelligence agency that can match the CIA dirty trick for dirty trick. That's life on the front line of the Cold War. His character of Arn Magnusson is a local Swedish folk hero because Guillou cleverly takes Arn's fictitious life and wraps it into real history in the form of the birth of the modern kingdom of Sweden. (Where I happen to be right now, but that's for a later blog post.) For instance, with a bit of handwaving the fictitious Arn becomes the grandfather of the very real Birger Jarl, whose grave I have seen and once sort of wrote a poem about. All the locations are visitable, and most of them are within a few miles of my inlaws. One of life's innocent pleasures is to watch Bonusbarn's face when he asks with resignation why we're looking at yet another church and we say "This is where Arn ..."

I was introduced to Arn's adventures by my future wife several years ago, but it's taken till now to finish them because at first only the first two books were translated into English. After that the publisher pulled the plug ... until recently. Different publisher, different translator, still the third book. Finally I know how it ends! Though given that Sweden exists, I had a shrewd suspicion.

In the first book, The Road to Jerusalem, Arn is born into minor Swedish nobility and for various reasons spends most of his childhood raised by monks, including an ex-Templar who teaches him various extracurricular non-monkly fighting skills. This is handy because at the end of the book Arn inadvertently sleeps (consecutively) with two sisters (hey, it could happen to any innocent young lad from the monastery), one of whom is his true love and one of whom is a scheming minx. For this sin he must do 20 years penance as a crusader in the Holy Land.

This brings us to the second book, The Templar Knight, which switches between his story and the story of the second crusade, and his beloved Cecilia doing her own 20 years penance in a convent back home. From her perspective we see the birth pangs of the new Swedish nation, while Arn's purity of heart, nobility and Christian virtue earn him the respect of Christians and Muslims alike, and make him one of the few crusaders, and very few Templars, to make it out of the Holy Land alive after the disastrous Battle of Tiberias. And finally - finally! - in Birth of the Kingdom Arn returns home determined to use his military skills and considerable wealth to bring peace to his homeland and forge it into a new nation, the kingdom of the Sveas, or Svea Rige, as you might call it.

If you read heroic fantasy for the world-building then medieval Sweden is described in enough detail to suit your every need, with no feeling of anything being contrived just to get a little extra buzz or laugh. (Plucking just one example from the air, like Arn and Cecilia's wedding night being unable to commence until the archbishop has made it up the stairs to bless them in bed.) If you read it for the military clashing and banging then Arn has it in spades, and the version of Christianity practised by the Swedes - a mixture of literalism, ritual, pragmatism and Marian veneration, all with residual pagan overtones - presses all the right buttons for anyone expecting arcane religions and magic. It's exactly the same as reading heroic fantasy, except that it isn't and it's a guilt-free trip.

Next up: Robert Harris's Lustrum, follow-up to Imperium, which I have previously reviewed and which has a similar effect.

Note: nothing herein in any way precludes me trying to write heroic fantasy if I ever decide that's the direction my career should take.

The man they couldn't pin down

First chapter of latest novel:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Second chapter of latest novel:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

(Who? Oh, him.)

Third chapter of latest novel:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I decided to stop there.

Ben and Bas in Beds

Can I come and give a talk in Wootton to the upper school reading club? said the email. Wootton, just up the road from Abingdon? Yeah, no problem. I'd just take a long lunch break, maybe half a day off work.

I'm sure Wootton only has a primary school, mused a colleague. I looked more closely at the email address: wootton.beds.sch.uk. Okay, I'm guessing "beds" isn't short for Oxfordshire. I may need to take longer.

Turned out to be Wootton Upper School, near Bedford, just past Milton Keynes if you can fight your way past the roadworks. First you have to drive through southern Milton Keynes, which is retail Mordor: vast and hideous, with towering, city-sized warehouses that you can probably see from orbit serving the likes of Amazon and John Lewis and which suck the very soul from you if you dare even glance at them. Sudden flashback to Big Engine days when it was cheaper for me to deliver my own books to Amazon than have them couriered, and I spent a happy day fighting my way past Amazon's shielding spells and wards to get a simple phone number of someone to call if I got lost.

Anyway, getting through Mordor more or less unscathed I then failed the simple little task of passing under the M1. They're converting the A412 into a dual carriageway and the whole area is a devastated battlefield with fewer signposts than the Somme. Then Google Maps lied to me by assuring me I could and should turn left into a road that doesn't exist any more, crushed into non-existence by the route of the new big road. I had already made out an invoice with mileage based on how many miles Google Maps said it should take, but I'll gift the school the extra as my bit towards easing a strained education budget. But I made it, and suddenly I was back in civilisation - a clean, airy, modern school with lovely people in it, both staff and pupils, who seemed to be expecting me:

Well, half of Sebastian was there (I only wrote books 1-3), but they also seemed quite pleased to see the whole of Ben Jeapes. I didn't do a head count but I would guess 30-40 turned up. I talked for an hour about how I got into writing; the various forms I have partaken of (my own stuff, Sebastian, the ghostwriting); agents; editors; how publishing and bookselling work; what to look for in good science fiction; and then gave readings of my favourite crank letter and (a world premiere) bits of the first chapter of the current work-in-progress. It's hard to tell how well you're doing: carefully honed witticisms may or may not be sinking in; they might be keeping silent for an hour because they are stunned by your awesomeness, or they might have tuned out long ago.

Following the hour's set piece it was an informal lunch and natter with the school reading club, me answering questions, of which there were many. Some harder to answer than others.

"Do you find working out plots hard?" "Yes." - Easy.

"I write romance stories; how can I stop them sounding corny?" - Um ...

It's not completely true that you should only write about what you know, of course: I've never captained a starship, for a start. But when it comes to writing romance I can't help thinking you probably should stick to your own experience and that really wasn't something I was going to talk about to a teenage lad I had never met before. "So, have you ... I mean, um ..." I suppose I could have told him to write under a woman's name. That seems to work.

I met some lovely young people with a real love for reading and writing, and at least two budding sf writers, which are of course the best type. I sold my first story when I was 24, published when I was 26, so give them another 10 years and I fully expect some high quality fiction to be emerging on the market. Pay it forward, guys ... (but thanks for the bottle of wine, that was a nice touch!).

Facebook gets its man

You can run from Facebook but you can't hide. Middle Godson's father tells me:

"You now have a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ben-Jeapes/103136406393148 because people like me have said that we like your books in our facebook profiles."

Well, whoever the other guy is, thanks to both of you and I will try to be worthy of your trust.

I have occasionally thought of reviving my Facebook account. I could defriend-

[Defriend? How the hell did that word ever become meaningful? If language shapes cognition - the jury will always be out, but face it, it must do to at least some degree - then a whole generation is growing up with the idea that one of the priceless treasures of being human, the ability to have friends, is something that can, nay should, be ended with the click of a button. It's a horrible, horrible word. If Facebook is ever hauled before some kind of Nuremberg for the crimes of society, this will be the first item on the charge sheet.]

- everyone I rashly signed up with in the early days when everyone was doing it, change my status to "writing" and leave it at that. This would be a way of dealing with all those people who start a conversation with something like "are you writing anything at the moment?" or "how's the writing going?"

To which the best answers are respectively "yes" and "fine, thanks, how's the marriage?", though I've never quite had the courage to use the latter because I know they're just trying to be friendly and wanting to have a conversation, and it would be like kicking a puppy. The implication of the latter response is meant to be that the question is far too personal and complex for the kind of short-term small talk they're thinking of.

But, speaking of writing, this is my morning pre-work writing time so I'd better get on with some. I'm within 20 pages of finishing the current Work-in-Progress's final comb-through. See, I'm sharing information already.

10% off

Looking for a good read to while away the summer break? The lovely folk at Lulu.com are offering 10% off Jeapes Japes, the collected short works of y.t. with added value editorial. They advise:

"Use coupon code SUMMERREAD305 at checkout and receive 10% off Jeapes Japes. Maximum savings with this promotion is $10. You can only use the code once per account, and you can't use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes."

I have no way of confirming this because self-purchases aren't eligible but I have no reason to doubt it works ...

Yup

Mike Oldfield & me

I hope I meet Mike Oldfield one day. His music was the background sound to most of my writing in the late 80s and early 90s. It would be only polite to say thank you. But as there's little sign of him dropping in any day now, reading his autobiography Changeling seemed like the next best thing.

General legend has it that at the age of 19 Mike Oldfield sold the idea of Tubular Bells to Richard Branson's new music company Virgin, and it went on to make a fortune for all concerned. No Tubular Bells, no Virgin Music, no Virgin Atlantic, no Virgin Galactic. Interesting thought. And that's mostly true, but even so it's not as if Oldfield just whipped it out of nowhere. He had been playing in clubs and bars since about the age of 12, getting more and more session playing experience under his belt, and Tubular Bells had been bubbling inside him for years. (Curiously, the bells themselves were a last minute addition when he finally came to make the album – they were still in the studio from the previous recording session and he thought he could probably use them.) He was able to record it almost from memory, with self-taught mixing and editing skills and with tapes he'd recorded even earlier in his teens.

And then he had to do a follow-up, a process he likens at one point to getting toothpaste out of a tube. He'd had his say! He'd recorded his music! What else was he going to do?

The problems of my life have very little overlap with young Oldfield's, who for one reason and another was a functioning alcoholic even before Tubular Bells, and did a tad too much LSD and needed some severely aggressive therapy in his mid-twenties to sort himself out. (The screams and howls in TB's "Piltdown Man" bit aren't faked.) But I'm eye to eye with him here. Y'see, it's dawning on me that my first three novels – not including The Xenocide Mission, because that was an unexpected sequel – were the three novels I really had inside me, struggling to get out. Simplistically, they were the Space Opera One, the Time Travel One and the Alternate History One. Then I had to write something else. Um.

Anyone who has been foolish enough to ask how my writing has been going recently will know that I've been rewriting, and rewriting, and rewriting ... if Hergest Ridge was toothpaste out of a tube for Oldfield, this is like pulling teeth for me. With a pair of tweezers. The first draft itself took some wrenching, but I got a story out and I like it. My publisher didn't, and to be fair I can see what he means. But it's the story! What do you mean, rewrite it?

As the world knows, Oldfield managed. Historical forces were against him – it wasn't his fault that Tubular Bells came out just as punk was coming in. After the rapturous reception of his debut work, he just couldn't understand why all his subsequent stuff was getting panned, even if it did keep selling. Finally he was able to keep going by redefining his entire approach and outlook, employing other musicians, riffing off their ideas and targeting his music at the market, at the same time as keeping it deliberately Oldfieldian. The first fruits of this new approach were his albums Platinum and then my favourite, QE2. He was back on track.

I enjoyed reading the book, even with its occasionally slightly clunky style which persuades me he really did write it himself rather than filter it through a ghost writer. Favourite anecdote: Oldfield's sister Sally, six years older than him, was best friends at university with a girl called Marianne Faithfull ... What with one thing leading to another, young Michael aged 13 or 14 found himself playing guitar in a recording studio with his big sister and her friend and her friend's famous boyfriend in the producer's box. Thus, shortly after, he was able to tell a teacher at his school who was predicting a life of miserable unemployment unless he got a haircut and some decent O-levels under his belt: "I've just been in a recording studio with Mick Jagger and I'm going to be a musician."

Nice one.

Richard Branson emerges mostly with credit. He wasn't the one who spotted the potential of Tubular Bells but he was the one who drove the money-making process. Oldfield gradually came to understand that his motive remained (understandably) making a healthy profit for Virgin, which is how within a few years Virgin had moved from being the company that debuted with Tubular Bells to the company signing up all the nascent punk bands. Oldfield understands but is still a little nonplussed. Tubular Bells' money-making potential for Virgin was helped considerably by the contract Branson foisted on its young, naive composer, giving him the lowest royalty rate possible, binding him to another 9 albums with Virgin and giving Virgin the rights to Tubular Bells for the next 35 years. Oldfield finally got it back in 2008.

There's a parallel universe where Moonlight Shadow still has the lyrics Hazel O'Connor wrote for it, rather than the ones Oldfield dragged out of himself with the help of a rhyming dictionary, a bottle of wine and an all-night writing session. It would make interesting listening. The success of that song gave Richard Branson ammunition to encourage Oldfield to write more and more songs, and less and less instrumental stuff: the logical conclusion was his album Earth Moving, which is all songs, and barring a couple of tracks really is the most forgettable item in his output. Oldfield hit back with the mighty Amarok – nothing that could remotely be made into a single, every instrument under the sun, Zulu choir and Maggie Thatcher (impersonated, in the last couple of minutes) all thrown together into a glorious hour-long mix. And when he finally broke free from Virgin, the result was Tubular Bells II which was and is a work of genius.

He didn't always enjoy the process of re-identifying himself as a musician, with its loss of control and whiff of compromise, but it's what makes him a pro rather than a talented amateur. And face it, when even the work you don't particularly enjoy leads you to live outside the UK for a year for tax reasons, there are compensations.

I'm sure I can learn from this with my own approach to writing. Now I just need to work out how ... I probably won't get the tax problem and I doubt my wealth will be indirectly funding innovative ventures into space. But you take what you can get.

Since you ask ...

The British Science Fiction Association is carrying out a survey of British science fiction and fantasy writers "to get a handle on the state of British sf". I see no reason why everyone shouldn't get to share my insights. So:

1. Do you consider yourself a writer of science fiction and/or fantasy?
I consider what I write to be science fiction and/or fantasy, and in my writing I try to contribute some new idea or concept to the field with each story or novel. However, not every idea that comes to me is necessarily science fiction or fantasy and it’s not impossible that one day I'll get round to writing something in another genre.

2. What is it about your work that makes it fit into these categories?
The fact it contains concepts that are either presently impossible or not yet possible given our current understanding of the way the world works. To wit: alien life forms, starships, faster than light travel, time travel, technologically advanced Neanderthals.

3. Why have you chosen to write science fiction or fantasy?
It has always been my favourite genre, for the possibilities it offers: the outsider view of humanity; geeky fun with technological and/or philosophical concepts; and big explosions.

4. Do you consider there is anything distinctively British about your work, and if so what is it?
Two of my novels have been predicated on the idea of the British monarchy still being around, in recognisable form, in the 23rd century. I don't think an American author would think twice about his nation's way of life still being around 200 years from now, or there being a US Space Force: he might wonder how it came about but wouldn't be surprised to learn it existed. As a matter of national pride I wanted to perpetuate some of the things I consider good about the UK: we are far from perfect but I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. So, that is probably distinctively British.

5. Do British settings play a major part in your work, and if so, why (or why not)?
Only one novel has been physically located in the British Isles, but as it dealt with the English Civil War that's not really surprising. Despite my answer to question 4, I try to make my futures as multinational as possible, in terms of setting and characters. Characters are generally multi-ethnic with names meant to imply mixed race ancestry. Why? Because my dream future would be like Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man: all of us quite unmistakably one race, with no superiors or inferiors, but at the same time able to draw on the marvellous riches of our many cultural heritages.

6. What do you consider are the major influences on your work?
I don't consciously set out to imitate anyone but I suppose I have been influenced by any writer who has given me a sense of joy and / or wonder in reading their work. Conversely, I do consciously set out not to imitate writers / TV shows / movies that get it wrong. Sometimes I actively try to correct the error (e.g. putting seatbelts in my starships …).

7. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between publishers in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?
I have a YA publisher so it's hard to say: my editors don't base their actions on the science fiction content. Scholastic Inc. in the US apparently had no difficulty with a novel about the Royal Space Fleet per se, but bafflingly renamed His Majesty's Starship as The Ark. However, this latter decision has also baffled other American YA editors I have spoken to so it could just be a Scholastic thing.

8. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between the public in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?
Not really, no. Based on reviews I've read and mail I’ve received, audiences on both sides of the Atlantic have similar proportions of those who get it and those who don't.

9. What effect should good science fiction or fantasy have upon the reader?
The sense of wonder! The reader should close the book with the feeling that they have been somewhere they could never have got on their own. New thought processes or neurons should have connected that mean they will never see the world quite the same way again.

10. What do you consider the most significant weakness in science fiction and fantasy as a genre?
More than any other genre? There is often the risk of everyone trying to put on the Emperor's New Clothes, maybe not realising the Emperor actually knew he wasn't wearing anything all along. I will stop stretching the metaphor before it breaks.

For example, someone coins the phrase "New Weird". Suddenly everything is New Weird – until it isn't, or people just get fed up with New Weird and move on to something new on principle, leaving all the official New Weird authors stranded.

11. What do you think have been the most significant developments in British science fiction and fantasy over the past twenty years?
The explosion in TV sf has been a significant development but not a particularly good one. We don't have any TV executives who are particularly aware of what constitutes good sf. Therefore they scramble to imitate either Joss Whedon or Russell T Davies, not realising that Joss Whedon has a very wide-ranging understanding of sf&f (so trying to imitate Buffy kind of misses the point) and RTD doesn't (so trying to imitate Dr Who will get you nowhere: the strengths of the series predate RTD by a long way).

On the plus side, the crop of authors who came up through Interzone are flourishing, and more power to them. Twenty years ago would a very good but not particularly famous sf author have got a £1m, 10 book deal? I think not.

CRBeebies

The CRB system was set up in the wake of the Soham murders, committed by Ian Huntley. Huntley had been able to get a job at a school despite some previous by using his mother's maiden name. The CRB system checks, amongst other things, that you have always been who you say you are. Therefore it could probably catch another Ian Huntley. It couldn't catch, say, another Gary Glitter, who was only found out when an engineer at PC World found pictures on the computer he had taken in for repairs. Muppet.

It certainly wouldn't and couldn't catch the family members or long-standing acquaintances of children who are the most likely to commit any form of abuse. But still, the grasp of the CRB spreads and spreads, instilling a sense of false bureaucratic security in the brains of politicians and tabloids but absolutely no one else, and now it has reached the realm of famous authors.

Fortunately things aren't quite as bad as they're being painted. Yes, authors who visit schools more than once a month will have to apply for a CRB (and representatives of other trades too, presumably, but authors are a large subset of the whole). And yes, that does include people like Philip Pullman, Michael Morpurgo, Anthony Horowitz, Quentin Blake … And yes, it costs £64 to prove they're not paedophiles. BUT, in the case of authors, that will be apparently be paid for anyway, and those of us who visit schools less than once a month won't be required to register. (This assumes the teachers in charge of visits to be fully au fait with the regulations and not insist on CRBs for everyone, regardless, which is by no means a given.) So the situation hasn't really changed. That much.

It remains utterly ludicrous, as Mr Pullman points out: in 20 years of visiting schools, he has never been left alone with kids. Ever. But the logic of applying the rule to the once-a-month-or-more brigade is precisely that: prolonged and repeated exposure allegedly increases the chances of grooming the kids for Unspeakable Acts. How you do this when faced with a baying mob of 50 year 9s and 10s, I have no idea. I doubt anyone does. But that's the roolz.

Once, on a school visit, I was asked to wait in the staff room for a while, and then a single solitary boy, aged 13ish, was sent to get me when everyone was ready. So I suppose I was technically alone with a child, for about 5 seconds. The staff room had a glass wall looking onto a main corridor, but still I suppose that if I was a really, really determined, cunning and persuasive paedo – and if the young man was brain dead, dumb and physically handicapped – then I could have got lucky. We really are pushing the bounds of probability here.

Some further reading on the subject:

• A handy lesson on false positives. Take home statistic: you are scanning 3000 people with a system that gets it 90% right. One person fails the test. How likely is he to be guilty? Answer: 0.3%.
• Charlie Stross on why he doesn't intend ever to apply for a CRB – not that he does school talks anyway, and not that he would need because of the less-than-monthly rule.
• Juliet McKenna gently poking at the flaws in the system.
  

Any politician who tries to rationalise the system will inevitably provoke hysterical screams of wrath from the red-tops, and be labelled as soft on crime by the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition. So, cross-party action – which is would be needed to change anything – is unlikely if it's a single party issue. The hysteria could however be toughed out by the next Prime Minister and the next Labour leader (highly unlikely to be the same person) working together. The former will be a product of a system that can actually understand the non-tangible benefits of authors visiting schools. The latter should welcome the chance to distance himself from the triumphs of his predecessors' reigns. It could work.

Meanwhile Pullman et al will have to decide what matters more to them – the grind and, yes, the insult of being required to register, or the thought of the kids who would greatly value their visits being deprived of same. And Anthony Horowitz has nothing to fear: the CRB form is extremely unlikely to have a question saying "Are you now or have you ever been the perpetrator of Crime Traveller" so his secret is safe.

Prologue prejudice

Prologues never did Chaucer any harm, generally speaking, but all in all I'm against them.

For some reason they work better in films or TV than in a book. They can set up a scene, or deliver some nice misdirection, or alternatively scatter some useful clues. They can establish an atmosphere. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that. A friend who went to see The Prestige, having earlier read the novel, was amused to see that the opening credits – a panning shot of dozens of identical-looking top hats – essentially gives the entire plot away, but no one who hasn't read the book is going to realise it. Thus, later on, the switched-on viewer gets the "aa-aa-h!" moment of understanding. But imagine if the book started with a description of the hats – that would just be pointless. Eventually the reader would get it, but so what? And that's why the book doesn’t do that.

This is not to say I won't use a prologue, ever. I already have. His Majesty's Starship kicks off with a press release. It seemed the quickest way of setting the scene. So I'll allow a prologue like that – something that seems off-whack with the story in general, so that the reader is intrigued to see how the two tie in.

But prologues that are essentially missing chapters from the body of the book – no. The information contained within such a prologue should emerge naturally within the story anyway. Case in point – an enjoyably flawed work I've just finished called The Last Templar by Michael Jecks. This, I'm guessing, was meant to kick off a medieval murder series in the vein of Cadfael. And it does – I gather there are other books with the same heroes – but not half as well. Part of that is way the author populates fourteenth century Devon with time travellers who invite visitors in for "a glass of beer" and can pin their movements down to "ten o’clock" or "half past seven". (He does however know his technical details, like how houses were made and lived in at that time, and boy does he make sure you know it too. But there are exciting action scenes, and a couple of good bits of misdirection, and the way he describes the glooming, looming Devon moors makes them almost come alive as characters in the best Gothic tradition. Credit where credit's due.)

BUT: it's a three-murder mystery and the most significant of these was an abbot who was tied to a tree and burnt alive. The abbot's abduction by two individuals was witnessed and it soon becomes very clear to the reader that there are only a couple of people in the novel who could possibly fit the description. One of them is quite obviously a nameless gent we met in the prologue. Now, without the prologue, we might think "that looks like X … but he’s obviously one of the good guys and I can't think why he would do something like that, so it can't be." Meanwhile X's history could be revealed bit by bit and the reader would be caught up in the excitement of discovery.

But no. Thanks to the prologue we can immediately guess 95% of what happened with perfect accuracy, and see why X would do that, and so the rest of the novel – approximately half, or more – is a frustrating exercise of watching the hero be immensely thick until even he can't avoid working it out.

Prologues. Avoid, if possible.