Tag: Books

Writing Workshop

Posted on by Neal Asher
Here’s a thought: how about a writing and criticism section on my message board? A place where people can stick up samples of their writing and have others criticise it? This would be an internet version of the kind of postal workshop, or folio, I was a member of for about 10 years…
Obviously I wouldn’t be able to add lots of comments myself while I’m in Crete, but this could still be a useful resource for those who want to write.
H/T Guy Haley

Oh, and seeing as I nicked this idea from Guy I just went and bought his novella (a mere 65p) for my kindle.

Mental Fat

Posted on by Neal Asher
Well how things change. After deliberately avoiding rant sites over the last few weeks and concentrating on science I’m finding my attitude changing. I read a copy of the Daily Mail this morning and just flipped through it: Cameron and Milliband getting shouty, bored, move on, more politics, yawn, stuff about religion, you lost me there, don’t give a shit (never did), vague interest in some articles, losing it halfway through. Sod it, I’ll twitter some nonsense, write a blog post and then concentrate on what I was working on yesterday: the motivations of Penny Royal, Earth Central and a weird character called Tuppence.
We know that if you exercise your body in a particular way it gets stronger in that way: if you run a lot you get better at running, if you lift weights a lot you get better at weight lifting. But the same applies to the mind: it has muscles that can be exercised. Concentrate on doing crosswords and you get better at it as you learn the convolutions of the cryptic puzzle-maker’s thought processes. Concentrate on Sudoku and you exercise the number and pattern recognition parts of your brain. Read a lot and you get better at reading – your vocabulary increases and you can digest larger concepts. 
These are all fairly obvious, but there are other muscles operating (or perhaps a better description might be neural routes or programs – I’m simplifying here). Where do you get your ideas from? I am asked – as all writers are. Well, I’ve been bench-pressing with my imagination so it’s getting stronger. How is it you can write so much every day? Because I’ve been doing it a lot, guys. Ever worn a hole through the space-bar of a keyboard? I have.
And then we come to the not so great aspect of the mind. It can get as lazy and as stuck in damaging routines as the body. By perpetually following those routines they become hard-wired and dominant. They’re mental fat, they’re the result of the mental equivalent of sitting on the sofa eating biscuits and watching TV when you know you really need to swap out the chocolates for raw carrots and go for a run. They can be addictive and just like physical sloth they can be more difficult to defeat as you get older. In the end, trying to think differently can be one of the most difficult things to do, perhaps, on each individual occasion, more difficult than foregoing that Mars bar and making yourself do twenty sit-ups. 

Brighton Weekend

Posted on by Neal Asher
So, we popped down to Brighton (I’ll scatter a few pictures here) by train to visit Peter Lavery. He was the editorial director of Pan Macmillan (and Tor) and is now retired, that is, he doesn’t have to go to London any more but still spends a lot of time freelance editing books. He bought flat in Brighton because he likes to be by the sea, with easy access to plenty of facilities, but also wanted a place with fewer stairs. He’s worried about his mobility in later life, but still manages to leave us Essex flatlanders utterly knackered when we all go for a stroll.
Arriving just a quarter of an hour after us from Hastings was the legendary Tanith Lee and her husband John Kaiine, and we enjoyed plenty of red wine, fish-and-chips and conversation with them. Tanith Lee has been a bit of a heroine of mine since I started reading her books at about the age of 14. The first ones were Stormlord and Birthgrave, a particular favourite was Volhavaar and frankly, I’ve never read a book of hers I haven’t enjoyed. She’s written somewhere in the region of 90 books but for reasons that baffle me doesn’t get published so much now. However there is hope on the horizon concerning her backlist, which may be appearing as ebooks in the near future. If or when that happens I’ll let you know.
The following day I woke up with a mouth as dry as a camel’s fundament and a head feeling like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. This was my birthday, when we took a ride on the Brighton ‘eye’, had more fish-and-chips and red wine and when I got my present from Caroline: a Kindle. So I have now joined the 21st century.
The next day, after obligatory strolls, we then met up with Elizabeth and Deirdre Counihan. These sisters were the publishers of a magazine called Scheherazade – one of the many knocking about in the small presses twenty odd years ago and in which my story The Halfman’s Cellar appeared. We had pasta with the red wine and conversation this time.
In all it was an enjoyable experience, though bloody cold and I didn’t enjoy the booze as much as I expected. Throughout it all we caught up on a lot of publishing world gossip. It was both sad and illuminating for me to realize just how many writers, who were taken on by Macmillan at around the same time as me (I’m talking about over a couple of years), have fallen by the wayside. Counting up this morning I see that less than half of them are still around regularly producing books and getting published.
Writers who were heavily hyped and vaunted as the next big thing appeared with a big flash-bang and disappeared with a whimper. The reasons behind this are manifold. Some did some really silly things, like getting greedy agents who claimed to be able to turn them into major league sellers and just failed to sell their books. Others just could not keep up the production, or match the quality of their first book. Some became rather too in love with the idea of what they thought they were, and forgot that this is a job that you really need to keep working at. They believed their own hype and thought everything they typed was gold, and it wasn’t. Others just decided they hated the whole writing world and dropped out of it.
During those lengthy conversations I also got confirmation of some things I already suspected. Publishing is no different from any other human endeavour: favourites can be chosen and cliques formed, bitchiness can abound (especially among the writers). Writing for critics might get you some nice publicity and you’ll find yourself feted amongst the SFF literati and wannabe academics, and you might even snatch a few awards. But writing for your readers and keeping an eye on ringing tills is what will ensure your survival. Having an editor who isn’t afraid to tell you you’re waffling is an essential. Never believe the hype – believe your fans and believe sales.
An enjoyable and interesting weekend in all, but now it’s time to get back to work.   

Daily Parasite

Posted on by Neal Asher
Just a recap here for those who maybe don’t know: While I was climbing up the SF-writing ladder, in fact, if I recollect correctly, when I was working on The Parasite for Tanjen Books, I ended up chatting to the mother of a friend. Now, both the mother and father of said friend were smart cookies – both were vets. She gave me some advice on punctuation that has stayed with me ever since, but she also loaned me a veterinary book on helminthology, which is the study of parasitic worms.
I was at once fascinated. Firstly the book reminded me of books my mother had studied during teacher training and which I pored over as a child, what with their anatomical pictures or internal organs, musculature, skeletons etc.
(Oh, on a side note that was very much a formative period of my life: as her main subject in teacher training she studied mycology (fungi) which, for a kid, was great. Not only did we go to woodlands hunting for these weird and wonderful things but we could also eat them, which appealed to the hunter-gatherer in me. Now I can identify quite a lot of British fungi and of course this interest led to mycelia … which led to Jain tech)
Secondly, I found the intricate life cycles of these creatures fascinating, just as I was boggled by the way they could manipulate or physically change their hosts. Some of this went into The Parasite, an awful lot of it went into short stories: The Thrake, Cave Fish, Choudapt, Putrefactors, Spatterjay, Snairls and Shell Game to name but a few. Then, of course, when it came time for me to write a book after Gridlinked I picked up two of those short stories – Snairls and Spatterjay – and used them as the launch pad for The Skinner and the two ensuing books.

So what am I waffling on about? Well, the above is why I was so glad Vaude passed on the link to Parasite of the Day (thanks Vaude). This is just my kind of stuff. I am almost certainly going to read every article on that site. Also thanks to Dr Tommy Leung who has just changed the black background of that site to make it easier to read!
Oh, and some character in my books has definitely got to be hit by a weaponized version of the above. I can see him/her dying horribly while sprouting mushrooms.
  

Science Fiction Singularity

Posted on by Neal Asher

I had gone off Horizon programs because of how dumbed down they’ve been, how so often they were lacking in content – what content they had often being spread over an hour when, if you cut out all the pointless camera shots, they might have filled twenty minutes – and by the frequent righteous environmental preaching. However, I did record one called ‘Playing God’ (a title that put me off straight away), and enjoyed it immensely.   

This was about synthetic biology – essentially genetic modification – and how far advanced it is now. In the program we see the spider goat – a goat that produces a useful spider silk in its milk – and a pre-production plant for making diesel from GM yeast as simply as alcohol is made from the normal kind. The advances are coming at an ever increasing pace what with people being able to do this stuff in home labs. They can buy ‘bricks’ which are chunks of DNA that express certain characteristics, over the Internet, and mix and match them. For example, a bunch of enthusiasts pasted a jellyfish gene into e-coli to make luminescent bacteria – this in the kind of lab any of us could put together in a garden shed.

This is massive; this is a game changer. As the presenter noted this is like Bill Gates putting together a computer in his garage.

Of course the presenter had to whiffle on about the ethics of it all and whether it should be done. All the objections were based on either the Abrahamic religions or the ones springing from the Church of Environmentalism, and of course the terror of change they like to stir up. However, it is far too late to put this one back in the box.

It has been said (well by me at least) that nothing dates faster than science fiction, and this program brought it home to me. In science fiction there’s a lot of talk about various kinds of singularity. It’s usually related to the creation of AI and is seen as an ‘intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict’. It occurs to me that science fiction itself is facing its own singularity of exactly the same kind. We’ve reached the stage now where between writing a book and it being published, part or all of the content of that book can go out of date. Of course with e-books the gap between writing and publishing can be closed but, in maybe just a little time, we’ll reach the point where even as we speculate or extrapolate we will be going out of date, then the point when we’ll simply be well behind the curve.

There has been (for a very long time) much talk about ‘the death of science fiction’.  Maybe that will occur when the need for sensawunda, which we all look for in SF, is supplied by the news every day, or even in our day-to-day lives. If that happens I’m not sure I’ll be particularly upset about it.   

Loony Tunes

Posted on by Neal Asher
Bloody hell, it’s pouring out of me. It’s 3.25PM as I write this and I’ve done my 2,000 words despite having taken an 8-mile cycle ride and despite twittering like a canary. I think this might be due to the constraints I had to write under with The Departure, Zero Point and Jupiter War. In those books I was writing about the near future and necessarily had to limit myself to technology that was a few steps back from A C Clarke’s Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Further constraints of course kicked in with the later books because they had to relate to the previous ones. The whole story was set in our solar system too so I couldn’t let myself go with weird ecologies nor could I march in any acid-spitting monsters, or creatures with multiple stages of life, or giant tentacled fish.

Now it’s different. Now I have the feeling I experienced most with The Skinner, in varying degrees throughout the other books (the next one I felt it most being Brass man). That feeling is fuck it, I want to get really weird, I don’t want constraints, I’m going stick down every bizarre idea that comes to me, run with it and try to weave it all together. This is why Tuppence, Dr Whip and Harriet are now on the scene. These are, respectively, the captain of an ancient prador cargo-hauler who we see in avatar form but who is also something … monstrous; a pale tall doctor who was once adjusted by Penny Royal and who never takes off his sunglasses; and an exotic dancer who has transformed herself into a troodon dinosaur, and likes eating people.

Feeling a bit loony today.

Errors in the Books

Posted on by Neal Asher
I’ve just been told by the nice lady who deals with the copy-editing on my books that they can and do correct mistakes in the books after publication. I have in fact asked if it would be possible to supplant all instances of ‘whilst’ in The Departure paperback with ‘while’. Now, can any of you come up with any errors in the books that you’ve spotted? I know that there was a typo in the first pages of Line War and one or two other errors have been pointed out to me, but these are buried somewhere deep in this blog.

If you do come up with any mistakes, please let me know exactly which issue it is of the book concerned – whether it’s the hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, and which cover – since the page size and spacing may be different with each. An error on page five of the hardcover might appear on page four of the paperback.

Short Stories and Stuff

Posted on by Neal Asher

Well, it looks for sure like Piper’s Ash, who published Runcible Tales, has closed:

After some 40 years promoting new authors, we regret to say that we are now closing down our business. We wish new authors every success in the future with new publishers.

This means I now have a handful of short stories to go towards another collection: Always with You, Blue Holes, Dragon in the Flower, The Gire and the Bibrat & Walking John and Bird. Other stories that could be made part of a collection include Shell Game, The Cuisinart Effect, The Rhine’s World Incident and perhaps some others sitting in my files that are unrelated to the Polity (as most of these are) or Cowl (the Rhine’s World one).  The thing about The Gabble was that Peter Lavery asked me to confine myself to Polity stories so it fitted in with the rest of the Macmillan books, so I have plenty of other stories knocking about that don’t really fit anywhere.

Meanwhile, it’s lovely to discover that I’m right-wing (and probably a fascist) and that my writing is ‘a bit moronic’ and the ‘political anvils’ I drop into my work are naïve. This of course means that all of you who enjoy my books were too stupid to notice my obviously deep desire to stomp all over you with jackboots as opposed to, say, always protesting about big autocratic government. I never realized, but now it’s been made clear to me I will of course be off to get a swastika tattooed on my forehead. Surely it was clear that all the Polity books described the fascist state I wished we all lived in?

And meanwhile I’ll get back to Jupiter War, the last book in this Owner trilogy. I ask what I consider to be some serious questions, but these books are completely irrelevant. In failing to conform to correct political thought and not loving big state socialism I’m obviously as dumb as a box of spanners.

Writing Update

Posted on by Neal Asher

It didn’t take me very long to go through the copy-editing of Zero Point. There were a few questions asked to which the answers ranged from, ‘Yes, do it,’ to, ‘No, leave it alone’. What would you think the answer should be, for example, to changing EMR and EMF to EM radiation and EM field? The rest of it was all about house style. I had a momentary worry when I thought they might be deleting all my ellipses until I was informed they were supplanting them with just a more widely-spaced version. I also learned something about enquire/inquire (as used by Macmillan). The former is for general usage, the latter is used more for asking for information as part of a formal investigation. I really should have known this since the distinction is in their dictionary definitions.

Perhaps it’s time for me to pick up and read again Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Incidentally another much simpler book to read about this sort of stuff is Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, though in this case it doesn’t happen to make the distinction.

After finishing with Zero Point, also writing the acknowledgements and dedication, I was undecided for a while about how to proceed. I really needed to look at Jupiter War again, but was reluctant to get into another boring read-through when I was having so much fun with Penny Royal. I decided on the boring read-through, since it wasn’t going to just go away, and it’s going quite well. Little inconsistencies and conflicts that were niggling at the back of my mind it turns out I had already nailed, and the reading is easy. I’m now more than halfway through it and when I’m done I’ll print it up, hand it over to Caroline, then later go through it myself again, backwards.

Then it’s back to Penny Royal.

More on the Departure

Posted on by Neal Asher

Having gone ‘ouch’ a few times after daring to venture a peek at the bad reviews on amazon and elsewhere, I’ve been having a little think. One of the main criticisms of The Departure seems to be the ‘political diatribes’ (or in one case ‘Thatcherite propaganda’) in my chapter starts. Admittedly I should have attributed them rather than let them stand, since some of them are from subnet bloggers and some from govnet bloggers. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I decided to do a little experiment with one of them by just changing a few words. This first one is directly from The Departure (shortened a little):

Once the Committee had firmly tightened its grip on Earth, it distributed wealth only on the basis of its own survival. In the beginning, ‘zero asset’ citizens received just enough to keep them fed, clothed and housed, whilst ‘societal assets’ could receive considerably more, calculated on the basis of their use to the Committee and how much more of a contribution could be derived from them by allowing them more. But the Committee itself sucked up the bulk of world wealth through building the infrastructure of utter control, and by maintaining its upper executives at a level of luxury never before witnessed on Earth.

And here’s another version:

Once the corporations and bankers had seized control of Earth from democratically elected governments, they distributed wealth only on the basis of their own survival. In the beginning, unemployed citizens received just enough to keep them fed, clothed and housed as a ‘labour pool’, while those employed in the corporations could receive considerably more, calculated on the basis of their usefulness and how much more of a contribution could be derived from them by allowing them more. But the corporations sucked up the bulk of world wealth through building the infrastructure of utter control, and by maintaining their upper executives at a level of luxury never before witnessed on Earth.

It would take me at best a week, mainly using find-and-replace, to completely flip this book over into the realms of ‘acceptability’. Sad but true.