I'll be appearing at the Scarborough Literary Festival on Saturday 17th April (at 1 pm to be precise, with Tom Holt and Peter Guttridge; but otherwise just knocking about that fine town). I don't often do festivals or cons, so this is also quite a big deal for me. I'll need to get the train up and everything.

A note on my blogging: one New Year's Resolution of mine is to complete the Hugo translation I've been engaged in, off and on, for ages now. It has lain idle for half a year, but I shall restart it. Also, I've rethought Punkadiddle. I've removed the occasional pictures that appeared there, leaving it as a pure reviews blog. I don't have enough blogs, so I've set up another one, Tin Pics, on which to post any sketches or drawings or tinny little pictures I come up with; but I don't expect anybody to follow that, except, perhaps, those members of my immediate family whom I sketch. And even then will probably be uninterested in my Hugo doings. Which is all fair enough.

My starting point for this piece of writing is the observation that a great many Fantasy novels (and there are a great many Fantasy novels) undertake scrupulously medievalised worldbuilding in every respect except the characters, who are rendered thoroughly twenty-first century in sensibility, attitude, taste and expression. This, I suppose, is to facilitae facilitate the twenty-first century reader's imaginative point of entry into the novel; but it is a lie, corrosive of the broader aesthetic project of imagining Fantasy in the first place. Fantasy ought to be more than a mildly escapist exercise in dressing up in colourful costumes. So I wonder: what would it be like to read a Fantasy novel not only set in a medievalised world, but detailing the adventures of medievalised characters (pre-Romantic, non-bourgeois characters; characters for whom shame, not guilt, is the prime ethical shaper)? Maybe it's not possible to do that in a bourgeois form like, er, the novel. So jetison the novel: write a narrative in alliterative verse. Of course it is an almost endearingly foolish business (as my editor Simon gently pointed out) pitching a novel on the tagline: 'an attempt to inhabit not only the medieval trappings but also the medieval sensibility and form appropriate to High Fantasy!' So having written the first third in verse, I've switched to 21st-century characters--visitors to the Fantasy realm--and a properly postmodern prose idiom for the remaining two thirds. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that I'm enjoying writing it very much, I have no illusions about its comercial viability and do not, frankly, expect to see it in print any time soon. The plan is to finish writing it this month and to turn, after Christmas, to more likely-sounding fictional projects.

In other news: I was interviewed by Mariella Frostrup for BBC Radio 4's Open Book (the Reading Clinic section). Strangely the webpage for the show in question, 23rd Nov 2008, seems not to exist. There may be nefarious explanations for this, or perhaps benign ones (the ones for other weeks are all there). Also I seem (whoops) to have delayed posting this information for more than a week, so that the Open Book 'Listen Again' facility now takes you to last Sunday's, rather than the Sunday-before-last's, show. That means you won't be able to hear my ramblings. Ah well.

In other other news, you should check out Rich Puchalsky's blog. One reason for doing so is that he reviews Splinter there in some depth; but this is a small reason and there are big reasons too: go see for yourselves.

Ah, the fun we had recording that, what with the transatlantic phone line repeatedly giving us ten minutes of talk-time before suddenly cutting out in the middle of recording such that we had to start all over again. But we got there in the end.

Secondly, you can find at The Valve some reviews what-I-wrote of the 2008 Booker Longlist, the 2008 Booker Shortlist (you'll see how cunningly I manage to pay a great deal of attention to all the novels except the one that finally won it) and the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature.

And finally Simeon Tsanev drops me a line to let me know an interview I did for the Bulgarian bsite Shadowdance has gone live. Ah, the more I see it, the more I come to hate that wikipedia photo of me (an official wikipedia photographer snapped it at the Paris Book Fair earlier this year, on a Saturday when I happened to be dying). Still: Довиждане!

Other News: a couple of people have asked me whether I'll be doing a round-up review of the Clarke 08 shortlist, as has been my habit for a few years now. I'd gladly do this, but my usual place (infinity plus) has come to the end of its natural span. I talked a couple of other venues but they either didn't want me or didn't reply, so I may be spared the labour of writing the round-up this year. (I daresay I could jot some thoughts down on one of my blogs. Of course nobody reads my blogs, but that might actually be a liberating factor when it comes to the writing).

Overall it's not a shortlist about which I can say me gusto: not, although this has been the complaint of some others, on account of the proportion of 'mainstream lit' titles it features, for I don't see anything wrong in that, but because it's all rather samey. All of these books are historically-proximate alt-historical or near-future thrillers/adventure stories. Tom Hunter, the award administrator, has described the list as a 'map' of the contemporary SF scene, but if it is it's like one of those gag-maps you used to be able to buy: 'map of the world from the point of view of a Bostonite' which is two-thirds Cape Cod with other elements squashed to the horizon; or 'map of the world from the point of view of a Chelsea resident' which is 75% Sloane Square and the King's Road, with 'the north' running along the top border and nothing else there. (This sort of thing, in fact).

Or maybe Hunter is correct, and this list does indeed represent the state of SF today, rather than, say, just representing the taste of a judging panel who all happen to like reading alt-now/near-future thrillery adventure stories. But that would be a slightly depressing thing: a symptom of a genre shrinking and dessicating from the fullest scope of its imaginative possibility into a subset of airport thrillerdom. The best books on the list are probably the Baxter and the Morgan, but none of the titles here embody the mind-stretching, the sense-of-wonder, the conceptual metaphoricity and poetic, imagistic penetration of the SF that first made me fall in love with the genre. (An exception to this last judgment might be made for the Raw Shark Texts; but I found a deadening literalism to the way that novel handled its core metaphor, indebted to but lacking the sparkle of The Phantom Tollbooth; and I thought the Jaws-intertext was clunkily treated). Again, apart (to some extent) from the Baxter, they're all rather straightforward texts. Irony is not their idiom. They are books that if they are serious (about dystopia, the situation of the world today etc) are strenuously serious, and that if they are intertextual are ponderously rather than playfully intertextual. Naturally this, and that last point especially, is a statement of personal taste, not a broader aesthetic judgment: lots of people, inside and outside the genre, dislike ironic art. They prefer to know where they stand.

Finally: I learn today that my story 'Petrolpunk' has been bought by Nick Gevers for the Solaris steampunk collection Extraordinary Engines. Hurrah! The buzz surrounding this collection has been very good, and I'm chuffed to be on board. The fact that I said nice things about Nick in my previous post is an entirely unrelated matter; although my understanding is that he is indeed a tall, powerfully-built stallion of a man with an IQ in the thousands.

In other news, I'm thirty-thousand words into Yellow Blue Tibia and am enjoying myself. Better, today is the last day of RHUL term, so I'll have (give or take things like the birth of a son) a relatively free run at writing for the next few weeks.

Yes, the birth-of-a-son thing. Today, as well as being the last day of Michaelmas term, is Rachel's due-date. No sign of the baby yet, but presumably any day now.

Roberts, whom I always think must be the hardest working writer in the world, is a real shining gem of British genre fiction and one with many, many facets. No two books of his are alike, and his particular skill is extrapolating an entire novel from the kernel of singular idea.

Many many, no less.  I'm flattered.

The holiday enabled a certain amount of thinking; reflection, and specifically self-reflection, being a needful thing from time to time for a writer.  Or for anyone.  In part I have been pleasantly digesting some of the reactions to Headless (you can read them, below) and in particular the Deathray review and some of the reader comments posted (you can read them directly below) pendant to the sentiments expressed therein.  This is what I've been thinking.  My last three novels, Snow, Gradisil and Headless, are all--I can see, now--desert novels.  A desert of water ice; a desert of orbital vacuum; a desert of the soul; and in all three cases the concomitant mental and emotional sensibilities, and aesthetics.  In a way these three novels represent a sort-of trilogy, a thematic trilogy; and they are accordingly and necessarily rather barren.  I can hardly complain if people find this offputting.

What are the words that Robert Bolt put in the mouth of King Faisal in conversation with Lawrence, T.E., CB, DSO?  These: "I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees.  There is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."  One of the things that I love about that movie is the way we believe in Lawrence's love for the desert, the way it is never seen as mere romanticised orientalism, or topographic idealisation.  He knows what the desert is, and nevertheless craves it.  What sort of man craves nothing, anyway?  What's wrong with water and green trees?  (I summarise, in brief, the aforementioned reviews/discussion).  I could say, of course, that it is almost always a mistake for a person to try and write too violently against their own grain.  Doughty, for an instance, was an odd writer, creatively strange, stuck in weird ruts of his own that other people found rather baffling, ornate, clever, desertstruck ... what would it have benefitted him if he'd been persuaded by contemporary reviews not to be so odd?  I'd say Nick Gevers (below) gets it right with Headless, as far as the book's oddity is concerned.  There was a New Weird, briefly.  Any chance of a New Odd?

Then my ponderings took another direction: my next Gollancz novel, Swiftly, is not a desert novel at all.  It is, on the contrary, and in a rather peculiar and exaggerated manner, a novel about fertility.  Certainly about fertiliser, in Rabelaisian (or at least Bakhtin's version of Rabelais) mode.  My forthcoming Solaris novel, Splinter, starts in a desert, but very quickly smashes it up and replaces it with something again rather aggressively fertile.  It might seem a little belated on my part, only now to be seeing larger patterns in the way my books are coming out.  But then again, writing is a balance between what the writer plans and what emerges, in aleatory or at least subconscious tension with the Apolline planning.  Perhaps there's some tectonic shifting happening under my very own feet, and I'm only slowly becoming aware of it.  Maybe, and without directly informing me, my creative imagination has had enough of deserts for the time being.  Maybe there will be some explosive growth, elephants bursting out of the Narnian ground and so on.  Who can tell?

Meanwhile why not go add your ha'pennorth of beautiful English to a group-translate of Mallarmé?  Feel free.