Out of this World

It has been a good week. To begin with I sold a story to NewMyths.com and the acceptance email arrived in the final hours of my birthday – a very welcome extra birthday gift. Dead Man's Shoes is scheduled to be published in the March 1 issue of NewMyths.com so I will post a link when it happens.

The other thing that happened was I finally got the chance to visit the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library in London. I first learned about the exhibition when The Guardian newspaper ran a Science Fiction special to coincide with the opening, earlier in the year. It sounded good, but... well, it's in London. Everything UK is in London, and I'm not. For me it is an expensive deal to get down to the capital, so I muttered about it and hoped an opportunity would turn up.

And this week the day-job stepped up by sending me, not once, but twice down to the big city for meetings. On Monday I travelled with the laptop and ipad executives on the early train, feeling like I was important. Then, in London, I left the high-flyers and caught the tube out to Wood Green, to a tiny, overheated office, where 30+ people met in a room that was little larger than a news kiosk. But it was a successful meeting, not the least because it finished at 4.30, giving me time to dash back into London and catch the last hour of the British Library before it closed.

So, with barely a week remaining before it ended, I was able to see the Out of This World exhibition. And hey, it was worth it. Someone has done a remarkable job researching this thing. It really was very good indeed. Amongst the highlights were the hand-drawn timeline sketches for First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon (A Wirral writer it must be said). A page of the original theme tune score for Dr Who, by Ron Grainer of the BBC radiophonic workshop, (mercifully keeping the Dr Who content proportionate) and also a real gem, a page of an early typewritten draft of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, complete with typos and corrections and edits. This really was a rare and special exhibition. And it was all about the printed word; books and magazines. The temptation is, so often, to resort to film media - but this time the printed word was the focal point, and rightly so for a library exhibit, and it was so good to see.

So, a big thank you to my day job bosses for bankrolling this little outing. It's nice that, for once, things actually worked out.

Short-Story.Me

Back from my holidays in France (for details of that particular fiasco you might wish to pop over to Travelling in a Box) and after all the ups and downs it's nice to see that I have a story, Call Me Murph, that's now up on Short-Story.Me
This is a tidy little on-line magazine and it publishes some very nice fiction in a wide range of genres, so I am well pleased to be up there. It's worth checking them out.

Murder

My current work in progress is a murder mystery. No, I haven't gone all Agatha Christie, it has robots and quantum chromodynamics and stuff. But there is a strong who-dunnit element and I'm so enjoying the research, maybe even more so than the actual writing. The trouble with that is I'm doing a lot of Googling about creative ways of bumping people off, so I'm hoping it doesn't trigger something on any of the security agencies' computers, something that has bells ringing and unmarked cars arriving outside my house late at night. (Mind you, they won't find me there, I'm in the caravan in the mountains somewhere, right now, so yah boo! Enjoy the donuts) Seriously though, if the spooks do pick up on what I'm researching they're probably reading this blog, too. If you are, this next bit is for you. It's fiction, okay? It's research. None of it is real. (although the day-job boss might do well to watch his back - oops, that bit is a joke, promise.)
So there you have it. Watch out for a forthcoming story that combines Miss Marple with Asimov. Haven't got a title yet, but "I, Agatha" might be a contender.  

The Gates of Hell

Last summer I picked up a book in a small indie bookshop in Bala. The cover art was terrible and the title could have been better, but it was a disaster story set in Wales, mildly SFnal, and I thought I might give it a try. It's taken a while to get around to reading it, but a couple of weeks ago I started on The Gates of Hell by Geraint V Jones and I've just finished reading it.
And, you know, it was pretty darn good. There were a few rough edges here and there, but it kept me turning the pages and, well, it was kind of refreshing to see the end of the world through the eyes of the residents of a small North Wales village instead of via presidents, journalists and soldiers living in LA or NYC. There was some Welsh language in here (always translated in the notes) and this was nice, because I'm a bit of a sucker for the poetry of the Welsh tongue, even though I don't know any of it beyond the dual language road signs like dim parcio (no parking) and araf (slow). Some of the place names were changed of course, but I'm guessing it was set somewhere around Blaenau Ffestiniog - I'd love to know where for sure because I spent a lot of the book trying to guess locations.
Some locations were specifically mentioned though: My own home on the Wirral peninsular, for one, was portrayed as a deserted and waterlogged wasteland. I almost felt like giving the helicopter a thumbs-up as it flew past with the main protagonist inside - I don't recall the Wirral ever appearing in a Science Fiction book before.
What particularly won me over was the realism of the eventual global disaster, especially the false hope and anticlimax in the days immediately after the asteroid slammed down into the Antarctic. Probably this had much to do with the way the catastrophe was seen through the eyes of ordinary people living in an ordinary small village.
So yes, it had it faults, but I was more than happy to ignore them because this was a most entertaining read.

The Gates of Hell
Geraint V Jones
publ. Gwasg Carreg Gwalch

Hay Festival - Intermission

I've been to the Hay Festival, but as can be seen from the fine weather that has now arrived, I am, right now, back home again. Sadly the day-job doesn't allow a full week in Hay this year, but as soon as I escape from the clutches of accountancy, on Friday, I'll be heading back for another helping, so if you're down at Hay I wouldn't put your wellies away just yet.

So what were the highlights from the first weekend?

Top of the list has to be Niall Ferguson, the historian, who so eloquently spelled out the grim picture of 500 years of Western ascendancy coming to an end, now, this week, more or less. There's going to be a TV series to follow on from the book (Civilisation, which I loaded onto my Kindle as soon as I came back into 3G range) and this promises to be a must-see.

It seems funny, me buying a history book. I am not a history person. I've never got it. I've always been one to say that we should be looking to the future, not the past. But Niall Ferguson's talk amounted to a virtual epiphany. It was an OMG moment when he unleashed (on stage and in the book) a view of what history is all about; that 7% of all the people that have ever lived are alive today, so 93% are not; and that looking to the future there are an infinite number of possibilities, but look to the past and there is only one - and wouldn't it be cool to know what that one was; and that all the great minds of the past struggled and usually failed to live beyond middle-age, and this begs the question, what if they'd lived longer, what might they have accomplished then? All this is useful, no, essential, to a writer of Speculative Fiction. So isn't it time I got off my backside and studied some of it. Woohoo!

There were other high spots, too: Allison Pearson and her David Cassidy novel, appealing to a room-full of 40/50 ish ladies, but I enjoyed the talk and I might even read the book, (albeit on Kindle minus the girly cover-art).

Anyway, it's Friday and soon I'll be heading back for more. I've got a couple of sessions at HowtheLightGetsIn, including a discussion of the activities at Cern, and top of the list, Saturday afternoon, I have tickets for Julian Assange. That should be a good one.

Eastercon (British Science Fiction Convention)

Just back from Birmingham – the Hilton Metropole, where Illustrious, the 2011 Eastercon has been held over the Easter weekend. It was a weekend of highs and lows. The lows came mainly from the hotel bed, the most uncomfortable bed in the world. It was like sleeping on a mountainside. The mattress had collapsed leaving a 1 in 4 gradient down to the wooden frame and thence the floor. It was a bed that required perpetual attention and spatial awareness – these are not attributes that sit well with sleep.

But everything else was good. Some excellent panels and some excellent people. I met up with a few writers from Codex and it was good to be able to chat face to face. I was especially delighted for Aliette de Bodard who not only won the BSFA short story award but also secured a nomination in this year's Hugos. Way to go Aliette!

Best panel was a British Interplanetary Society presentation, delivered by Bob Parkinson, about the Skylon project, which could become a viable replacement for the Space Shuttle. And it's British! I was very sceptical to begin with. The phrase 'pie-in-the-sky' kept on popping into my head. Let's face it, we Brits are ideas people. We're dreamers not doers. When it comes to 'doing', what we do is sell off the designs to other countries for fractions of their true value. It's the British way. Let us hope that for once, we can be very un-British and do this properly. Because it's good. I was especially taken with the design philosophy "How little do we have to do to make this work?" They are keeping it simple and keeping the exotica to a minimum. What they have so far is brilliant! It is also encouraging that the British Government is not involved in any way. It's an encouraging start.

The photo is one I took from our bedroom window at the Hilton. The futuristic structure is the roof of the hotel swimming pool. It occurs to me that it looks a little like the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Very appropriate, I think.

Writing with Balls

So, I've been suffering with sore feet when I get up in the morning. Doesn't last. I hobble for a few minutes then its gone. But I looked on the internet and I read how it's quite a common complaint, and that a good cure is to roll a golf ball under your foot. I didn't get golf balls, instead I bought a couple of those super-bouncy balls that kids have that they bounce over your garden wall every few minutes.
So now when I write I do it in bare feet with a couple of these balls under my desk.
And Hey! Now I don't have sore feet in the morning.
They're sore all bloody day!