Still: news is -- I've now written a first draft of this title, with some changes (the Captain is now called 'Cloche' instead of 'Mason', for instance). The plan -- if I can persuade him, and he has the time -- is for the most excellent Mahendra Singh to illustrate it, in his initmiable, wonderful way: check out his Carroltastic Snark blog for some examples of what he does. I'm toying with the notion of translating it into French and seeing if les gens Bragelonne would be interested in it. Otherwise, I'm adding a couple more goodies to what will be the e-edition of Jack Glass, my 2012 Gollancz title.

Hiatus, Recess (break)
Hiatus, a small difference in pitch between two musical tones
Hiatus (linguistics), a phonological term referring to the lack of a consonant separating two vowels in separate syllables, as in co-operation
Hiatus (television), a break of several weeks or more in television scheduling
Hiatus (anatomy)
Hiatus, a discontinuity in the age of strata in stratigraphy
Hiatus (band), a Belgian crustcore band
Haitus (housemove), the enforced and massively frustrating gap of two-and-a-half-weeks between moving into a new house, and finally getting the Sky Broadband (for which we are paying) up and running.

Still, I'm back now. And 'Belgian Crustcore' sounds very cool.

The Fringe, Dec 2010

Scott: Thank you so much taking the time to chat with us here at The Fringe magazine. I’ve recently finished reading your latest novel, The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Adam: Thankee!

Scott: What inspired you to write the parody of the Hobbit, The Soddit, and now The Dragon With The Girl Tattoo, a parody of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?

Adam: I am inspired by the muse of parody, Pistākia. We all are, all of us parodists. Anybody who says otherwise is a dirty liar. She visits us in the small hours and puts the bat of parody up our nightdresses. Metaphorically speaking,

Scott: I’m a big fan of parody books and novels, especially ones like Scary Movie and the like. Do you enjoy this genre of movie as well or do you prefer the written format?

Adam: I like anything that’ll make me laugh: films, TV, books, anything. With written parody there’s an additional level of admiration—writing properly comic prose is just, technically speaking, very hard, for the simple reason that it’s much harder to judge the timing of a gag when you write it for somebody else to read at their pace. Writers who can do that, like Wodehouse or Clive James, are a marvel to me. On screen, or telly, that’s easier (you control the pace, and therefore the timing). But certainly there are parodic films seem to me amongst the greatest masterpieces of cinema. I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s Love and Death, Airplane!, Shrek.

Scott: What do you think about the latest trend of the Mash Up novel, such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Do you think they require much skill to write compare to a parody where you are recreating the story in a humorous fashion?

Adam: I have nothing but contempt for a writer who would take a classic English novel and rewrite it so as to include zombies. Contempt, I say. Indeed, contempt is too weak a word for what I feel. I need a harder word. I feel nothing but granite for such writers. I feel nothing but diamond.

Scott: With the introduction of e-book readers, like Kindle and Sony Reader, there is a current debate about the piracy of e-books and the loss of the print media. How do you feel about e-books?

Adam: I feel love.

Scott: A lot of new writers often ask about the amount of pages or words that a published author produces each day. How much time would you spend writing on a typical day, (if a typical day exists for a writer that is)?

Adam: I have kids now: my daughter’s nine and my son will be three in a couple of weeks. God knows I love them, but they don’t half knock a dint into the amount of time I have to write, and perhaps more pertinently the amount of energy. That and the fact that I have a day job, to help me pay the mortgage (I’m Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London) means that my time is squeezed. So the answer to your question is: I write at every opportunity I get. It means, at least, that I’m necessarily more disciplined. About the use of my time than I have hitherto been. If I’m in college, I’ll write at odd moments, usually in the evening. If I’m not, I’ll drop the kids at school and nursery, and go sit in a coffee shop with my laptop. I’ll buy the biggest cup of coffee they sell, a huge porcelain bucket of coffee, plug in my iPod with some suitable music, and then write like a dervish for as long as I can. Well. Not like a dervish, I suppose. Dervishes spin round and round. I don’t write like that. That would make me dizzy.

Scott: What sparked your interest in writing and did you start off by writing short stories or go straight to working on a novel? What markets did you send your short fiction to?

Adam: There are good reasons why new writers start with shorter fiction, to hone their craft, and to get into the habits of submitting work, dealing with rejection, selling stuff, building a reputation and so on, before going on to novels. As it happens, I didn’t do that. I do write short stories, sometimes, but only if someone specifically asks me to. Otherwise I’ll write a novel. There’s something about the novel form, its length and complexity, its elbow-room or its heft, that feels righter to me than shorter modes. So, no, I didn’t start by writing shorts—I wrote novels from the get-go. At first I wrote crap novels. Then I wrote novels that were less crap. Eventually, the crapness quotient of my novels diminished.

Scott: How do you approach your writing? Do you tend to develop a story in your mind and then proceed to conduct some research or is more of an organic method where you write the story first and research any technical aspects later?

Adam: It’s a pretty weak-ass answer (and I know Australians despise weakness), but “it depends”. Generally a medium path is needful: if I don’t know anything about what I’m going to write it’ll turn into sprawl; but if I know every last detail, all plotted and planned in advance, then the actual writing will become a chore, and that fact will communicate itself to the readers. Actual hard research I’ll partly do in advance, and partly as I go along; but the rest of it I’ll have some sense of what I’m doing, but leave myself space to surprise myself too.

Scott: As a writer it is interesting to hear what other writers read in their spare time. It is often surprising to hear the genres and variety of books other authors read. Can you tell us what are you reading at the moment and what you five favourite books are?

Adam: I read all the time: in bed before I go to sleep, when I’m sitting on the loo, on the train, when I’ve an odd moment, sitting in a chair, whilst I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, whilst the telly is on, whilst I’m cooking (a book in one hand, a pan in another, you see how it goes). My wife told me off for reading whilst I was driving, once. I mean, I wasn’t actually reading and driving at the same time; but—well, you know. Waiting at a red light. A book on the passenger seat. Pick it up, read a sentence, read another, hear the car behind me beeping, put the book down … and so on. If I were asked to offer advice to a new writer it would be: read as much as you can, as widely as you can. What am I reading right now? Well, I’m typing this in the evening (UK time) of the 7th December 2010. I’ve just finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, because the Guardian asked me to review it (it’s good). I’ve also just re-read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), because I have to lecture on it, this Friday (it’s really, really good). And, connected with that, earlier this afternoon I read quickly through Gosse’s father’s Omphalos (1857) in Google Books’ collection of out of copyright stuff. Omphalos is an attempt to reconcile Genesis with geological science, marvellously and ingeniously bonkers. I’m now reading David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is OK so far, although it’s not really blowing my mind. Or any other part of my anatomy. My five favourite books? That’s a really tough call. The big influences on me as a writer are things like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which I read first when I was twelve and have read every year since, more or less; Le Guin’s Dispossessed; Nabokov’s Pnin, or some of his short stories; one of the big late Dickens—Bleak House, maybe; or Dorrit—an early Chris Priest novel and … or wait, is that five?

Scott: There seems to be a lot more options available to authors to get published now compared to say a decade ago. What advice would you offer to unpublished writers in approaching publishers for the first time?

Adam: Be professional. It’s probably a good idea to get yourself an agent, but if you don’t: do a little research, treat the publishers as human beings, be professional, show a little respect, and a little common sense.

Scott: If you were stranded on a desert island, what five authors would you like to have as companions and why?

Adam: I’d want five very large, very buoyant writers, so I could strap them altogether to make a raft and come home. G K Chesterton, Dumas père, the rather wonderful Sam Sykes, writers like that. To be honest, I don’t know if I like the sound of this desert island very much. What’s the bookshop situation here? How easy is it for me to get coffee, and new books? Do they play cricket? What am I doing here?

Scott: Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to your next book.

Adam: Thank you! No, it’s a greater honour for me.

I think that about covers all the necessary bases. In the end I finished reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and thought it was OK, although it didn't really blow my mind.

1. You’re a SFF researcher and writer at the same time. Does your academic work have an influence on your writing and if so, what kind of influence? Or is it the other way round?

But the other way around would be ‘an FFS researcher.’ I’m not even sure what that is.

I wouldn’t say that my critical writings influence my creative writing, or vice versa, so much as I would say that both sorts of writing proceed from the same premise: that literature is inherently intertextual; that stories and images shape the way we live our lives, just as much as life shapes art’s stories and images. More specifically I suppose I’d say that my novels are, in part, critical interventions into the ‘megatext’ of science fiction, just the way the critical writing is. So: Salt is a midrash on Le Guin Dispossessed and Frank Herbert’s Dune; Stone remixes Jack Vance and Iain M Banks and so on. I don’t think my books are any different to the rest of literature in this regard, except in being, perhaps, a little more upfront about it. But Dune is already a remix of Asimov’s Foundation books via David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia film; and Asimov’s tales rework Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and 1930s Pulp SF. And so on.

2. How did you end up being a professor of 19th century literature AND SFF author at the same time? What was the university’s initial reaction to you emerging as a science fiction author? I mean, you ARE professor of the ”serious literature”. ;)

I like ‘emerging as a science fiction author’: like I’m coming out of the closet.

Well, I don’t know how it is in Scandinavia, but when a Professor of Literature is appointed in a UK University he or she is legally obliged to take up one or other Pulp or Junk-Culture association. My choices were: sff author; country and western singer; reality TV show contestant; burlesque dancer; Man Who Makes Models Of European Airport Termini Out Of Glued-Together Matchsticks or wrestler. For me the choice was obvious.

3. I think that one of your strengths is how you create vivid and plausible worlds in your books. Even the weird vertical world of On or oxygen-filled space of Polystom feel believable. What makes this world creation even more admirable is that you don’t write series but single novels. In series you have much more time to describe the world to the reader than in a 300-page novel. How do you create your worlds and what kind of background work do you do for them?

There’s a short answer and a long answer to this question. The short answer is: strong black coffee. The long answer … well I don’t have time to go into that here.

4. Describe your normal day as a writer (and why not as a professor also)? Are you a cafeteria writer like Jonathan Lethem or do you take a months vacation to Tokyo just to make sure you get the right feel to the novel like Jon Courtenay Grimwood?

Not all writers are called Jon, you know.

Jon Lethem has the right idea. Jon Courtenay Grimwood—whom I know a little—is both a very nice and an effortlessly cool individual; I couldn’t do what does, being neither. Actually, I don’t travel very much. In part this is a principled belief that I’d rather be Diogenes the Cynic, living in a tub, than Alexander the Great ranging far and wide. But it’s also the fish-out-of-water sensation of being in a country where I don’t speak the language, something I dislike. Practically that limits me to: France (since I speak a little French, with a suitably atrocious English accent), or Scandinavia, where everybody from University Professors down to the guy who sells lotto tickets on the street speaks flawless English. I don’t know about Japan. I’ve never been there, and whilst I’m kind of curious my sense is that Japanese is a really hard language to learn.

My work routine is very simple. On a writing day I (a) drop the kids at school/nursery, (b) cycle to the Costa or the Starbucks in central Staines, (c) buy a large black coffee, find a table, set up my laptop, put loud music on my walkman (at the moment I’m listening to Who’s Next) and write. I do that all morning. Then in the afternoon I go home, answer my emails, sort out admin, other stuff; and this is also when I revise stuff I’ve written on previous days. I can’t listen to music whilst I’m revising, or reading proofs, because I need to concentrate; but I can’t not listen to music when I’m writing my first draft, because if I don’t then I over-concentrate on what I’m doing and that clogs the process. This latter is also sometimes called ‘writers block.’ The good news is that there's a simple cure for it. Listening to music whilst you work.

My life as a professor at the University of London (‘non-writing days’) involves: (a) dropping the kids at school/nursery, (b) cycling to college (c) teach students, do admin and other university-style duties (d) er, that’s it.

5. Do you misuse your power as a professor and spread the gospel of SFF in your lectures? (Sorry, I just had to ask that.)

Hallelujah, yes

6. Many of your main characters are NOT likeable (e. g. Salt, Swiftly, Splinter). Actually, some of them are even repulsive. Why do you torture your readers with so unlikeable characters?

Because they’re more interesting. Some of my characters are unlikeable, I agree; but I’d say that most are just conflicted, or fucked-up, or tangled in various ways—I don’t find it hard to like them. This is how most people are, in the world, I think. SF as a whole has had something of a problem with characterisation: a tendency towards ‘likeable’ characters ‘with whom people can identify’ overcoming obstacles, going on a ‘journey’ of self-discovery; all that can-do positivity crap. Its not that it’s sappy wish-fulfilment, or even that it’s existentially mendacious—although it is both those things. It’s that it’s boring. As far as characterisation goes, I’d rather read Samuel Beckett or Nabokov than 99% of that sort of book. Iago is a more interesting character than Cassio, after all: but more to the point so is Othello, and he’s neither villain nor especially unlikeable, although he is conflicted. Severus Snape is a much better piece of writing than Harry, Ron or Hermione.

7. In your novels you’ve described (sexual) violence more than once. In Salt and On there are those kind of scenes and actually the whole Land of the Headless revolves around possible rape and guilt. What’s your comment on this?

It’s a serious matter, one I don’t take lightly. What I mean is: it would be easy to slip into a facile use of rape (say) as a sort of short-cut to a particular sort of affect, or readerly reaction. I’d hope I don’t do that; although there is a sense in which a desire to fuck-about with (again) the conventions of the genre, the long tradition of blithely sexualising and objectifying female characters, leads me to this sort of violence of representation. But it makes me a little uneasy, yes. Land of the Headless is the last of my novels to do with rape, and I think will be the last. It’s too gruesome and upsetting a subject to handle, I think. Besides, sexual violence has very little to do with sex, and a great deal to do with violence, which leads to your next question.

8. Actually this is a continuation for the previous question. When asked about the detailed and almost clinically described violence in his novels Jon Courtenay Grimwood answered something like violence isn’t pretty or cool and he wants people to keep that in mind. Like Jon you have sometimes very vivid and disturbing scenes of violence in your novels. What are your reasons for having them?

Violence in novels and films very rarely has any relationship to actual violence in the world; and I think (although I’m not specifically thinking of J C-G here) that most of the ultra-noir self-consciously gritty violence popular in film and books nowadays is just as much about the vicarious male fantasies of empowerment as any Bruce Lee or James Bond movie. I’m not really interested in that; or, I suppose to be fair, I don’t often indulge in it. The Jacobean or Gothic aspects of what I write, the violence in that sense, has more to do with a desire to rupture the conventions of the text; to fuck things up.

9. Okay. This is my trademark question. I’m too fond of it not to ask it everytime I have a chance. If your novels were music, what kind of music would they be? What’d you play?

I am the Elvis Costello of SF. Either that or the Moby Grape of SF. But I’d rather be the Elvis Costello of SF.

10. Could you name a authors that you’re reading at the moment. Is there any new SFF stars on the British soil that we should be watching for?
I read a lot, partly because I review a lot and write criticism and so on; but mostly because I love reading. At the moment I’ve just finished Adam Fould’s non-sf novel The Quickening Maze. Before that I read Thomas Pynchon’s latest, which isn’t very good. There are a lot of very good younger British SFF writers coming up: Alex Bell, Mark Charan Newton; Kit Whitfield; Joe Abercrombie (though he’s not so young now). I’m reading (in MS) a really good Viking/Werewolf novel called Wolfsangel by M D Lachan at the moment: watch out for it next year.

11. Okay. Take a deep breath, because this is a LONG (but not necessarily a good) one. It’s actually a bunch of questions tied to a knot but it seems to me hard to separate them… If you don’t get what I’m aiming at, just skip this question. It’s about your ambitions as a writer. Are your ambitions still the same as they were when you were writing your first novels or have they changed along the road? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember you saying in interviews that in every novel you want to come up with a new, original idea and not just write something you’ve already done. Do you still maintain true to this cause, and if so, why? (The origin of this question is actually a personal matter. In June we were discussing with Jukka about writing – because we both have ambitions in writing – and I was just about to give up the whole thing. Jukka said to me that if you have ambitions to write, you still have them when you’re nearing fifty or sixty no matter what you do. So the best way to deal with them, according to Jukka, is to try to achieve them. Otherwise they’ll just cause you more pain by haunting and accusing you. Well, that was the main point of Jukka, anyway. So, actually the thing I really wanted to ask is: From where does your ambition to write spring from and how do you cope with it? By coping I mean that the things we try to achieve usually turn out to be very different from what we were trying to achieve. So, in a sense, we often fail to achieve the original goal. Jeez, wasn’t that a badly structured question!

Is the question here the last seven words? Because the answer to that is: no.

To try and address the whole thing. My experience is that there are people who, perhaps vaguely, like the idea of being writers, and then there are actual writers. The difference between these two groups is that the former can take it or leave it, depending on various circumstances; whereas the latter have no option but to write. The hearts’-blood writers I know have to write; it’s more like a compulsion than anything else. If this is the case, then you should give it a go; Jukka is perfectly correct, in his impressively massy and sculptural way: if that’s the case with you, then it’s not going to go away, and you probably do owe it to yourself to try it. For me, writing borders on compulsion. As for writing a different novel every time: well, that has a lot to do with me not wanting to bore myself, or to bore the reader, by doing the same thing over and over. I’m afraid I’ve got a low boredom threshold. Asking how to cope with one’s ambition … that’s a very interesting question, and I’m not sure of the answer.

12. As Cheryl Morgan said you charmed the Finns in Finncon with your witty sense of humor. There was even a rumour going on that you had been a semi-pro stand-up comedian once. What do you thnk of that? Does this make you consider change of career?

Change my career? Ooh, I don’t know. How much does it pay?

[Clears throat] ‘My brother smeared creosote all over the entrance to my house. I had to kick him out. I said: “brother, never darken my doorway again …”’

13. Although you’re very witty and funny in live situation and joke openly the humour in your novels tends to be somewhat different kind - it’s subtler (YBT might be an exception) and has darker shades. One could even argue that the saying ”Devil is in the details” applies to the humour in your novels. Stone, for instance, is quite funny, but the source of funniness is the way in which the narrator, Ae, recollects and comments his/her story and describes the little oddities of the novel’s world (like nose enlargement for you-know-what…). The subtlety in your ”serious” novels is almost the opposite of the parodies you write. Do you agree/disagree? Why is there so big a difference – or is there truly?

I wouldn’t say so. What interests me, as I said above, is rupture … controlled rupture, I suppose; a breaking-through; or to put it in more positive terms the leap into something completely other, ‘transcendence’ the sense of wonder. That can be achieved conceptually, or in terms of narrative; but laughter is also that sort of rupture, or transcendence.

14. Some of your novels have this ”document” style which is to say that in them (e.g- Snow, Polystom, Stone, Salt and Yellow Blue Tibia) the text itself is an official document of some kind with footnotes and such. Is there any specific reason for you to write this way?

Aren’t all novels necessarily ‘documents’?

15. It seems to me that you write a lot about guilt, forgiveness and redemption. The most obvious example is, I think, Land of the Headless which revolves around the redemption of the poet Cavala. In Polystom the poor Stom is, even though he doesn’t seem to understand it, carrying the guilt for the death of his life. At least that’s the way I see it. And then there’s Eleanor in Swiftly, who is responsible for his husband’s death. And so on. Do you consider these themes crucial to you or am I just imagining it?

I think this is absolutely right. That nexus of things does fascinate me: guilt and shame; atonement and redemption. The reasons for that are doubtless very personal, rooted subconsciously as much as consciously. In turn that’s partly a cultural thing, what it means to be English in this day and age; and it’s partly that personal angle, the stuff the Killers sang about in their song ‘All These Things I Have Done.’ But the author is dead, as I’m sure you’ve heard, so it’s hard for me to be sure about the specifics of that last one.

16. In Yellow Blue Tibia Konstantin says when discussing with Dora: ”Science fiction is the Olympics games of the imaginatively fit.” Nicely put! Is this how you think about the SFF genre as well? Or is it your ideal of SFF?
Yes.

17. You like to pay homage to your predecessors and you don’t deny it. You even alter other people’s stories like in Swiftly and Splinter. What (SFF) novels would you like yet to ”revise” and why?

As I said above, I’ve reworked several of my key texts in this way. What haven’t I done yet? Well, I’ve long harboured the dream of combining two of the novels that have had a massive influence upon me (Lord of the Rings, A la recherche du temps perdu): to write a Tolkien-style fantasy after the manner of Proust. This would be a twenty-four book Fat Fantasy sequence, 800-1000 pages per book, in which there’s very little plot, but it’s all written with an immensely detailed, fine-grained prose. I have yet to persuade my editor at Gollancz that this would be a commercial proposition.

Otherwise: I’ve toyed the idea of writing a sequel to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to be called Twenty Eighty-Four. Set (obviously) a century later, it would have no individual human characters. Instead the logic of Orwell’s dystopia would have succeeded: states would exist but individuals would not. That wouldn’t be very jolly, though. One thing I have written, but which may not be publishable, is a properly medieval heroic fantasy: not just modern characters running around a medieval-style world with wizards and orcs and so on, but a properly realised pre-Modern realm, in which shame rather than guilt is the social logic. Since it wouldn’t be possible to write such a pre-Modern world in a Modern form like the novel, I had to write this as an alliterative poem, using the form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That was fun to do; but it would take a brave, or commercially suicidal, publisher to take it on. How many fans of Fantasy fiction go into a bookshop saying to themselves ‘what I really want is a Fantasy written in the form of fourteenth-century alliterative verse …’? Not many. Also I've never really written a Time Travel novel, but I'd like to, at some stage.

18. In the preface of the Palgrave The History of the Science Fiction (great piece of work) you write: ”And since we are on the subject of gratitude, let me record that I am not in the least grateful to the British Arts and Humanities Research Board - - A plague on their house. That this book was ever completed owes nothing to them at all.” Wow! Can you REALLY say that in an academic work? I bet they aren’t giving you money in the future, either. :D

Fuck ’em.

19. In an interview some time ago you admitted that you have some kind of fixation for gravity. And true enough, novels like Polystom, Gradisil and On are wrapped around this premise. But to me it seems that you’re also interested in the fabric of reality. In Polystom there’s this question of who created who and in Yellow Blue Tibia the reality is even more uncertain concept. What’s your view on the concept of ”reality? (Hmm, I’m not really sure I put it right. If you don’t get what I’m getting to, just leave it.)

Reading Philip K Dick at an impressionable age, as I did, can have a profound effect upon a person.

20. Even though you are ”only” a linguist, your novels are often founded on some state-of-the-art theory or theories which are sometimes explained in detail. How do you keep yourself up-to-date on these things and is it hard to create novels that are scientifically right without not having an education of physics/mathematics/etc..

How do you mean, ‘linguist’? Perhaps you were misled by what I said about Japanese, earlier? To be clear: I can’t actually speak Japanese. I’m really not sure that speaking English, and being able to say ‘la plume de ma tante’ with a very thick English accent, qualifies me as a linguist. I’m kind of flattered that you said so, though.

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: ?????????!

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 Mallarm�?� Feel free.