Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in PK's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 18th, 2008
3:49 pm	As I was saying ... I came home from SFRA excited with all sorts of ideas for things I want to write, and posts I'm intending to put up here, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately the combined effects of jet lag (I've yet to manage one full uninterrupted night's sleep since I got back), work (I arrived back in the office yesterday to find a mountain of jobs already waiting on my desk, it already feels as if I've never been away), and the unnerving realisation of over-commitment (I'm theoretically doing more in the last two weeks of this month than I would normally manage in two full months), have rather got in the way of my doing anything. So I will simply point out that going away seems to have done wonders for my productivity, at least if you count everything that has appeared while MKS and I were out of the country. So, in terms of tooting my own horn, I present: To Think, to Speak, to Use Reason, a column for bookslut A Discussion about Swiftly with Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland and Victoria Hoyle at Torque Control A review of House of Suns by Alistair Reynolds at SF Site A review of Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams also at SF Site A review of Omega by Christopher Evans at Strange Horizons A review of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow at Interzone (not on line) And that's not to mention the paper on John Crowley's The Translator that I delivered at SFRA. Hmm, maybe I should go away more often ... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
10:30 am	June books Half way through the year, and comfortably more than half way towards the 50-book target, though alas just short of the half-way mark for my personal 60-book target. #24: Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams, a pretty good reprint anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction that I reviewed for SF Site. #25: Why Aren't They Here by Surendra Verma, a breezy journalist's take on the search for extraterrestrial life that I reviewed for Vector. #26: The Translator by John Crowley, re-read in preparation for my paper at SFRA. #27: Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook, the first volume of Sandbrook's history of modern Britain takes us theoretically from 1956-1963, though it actually ranges far more widely than that. Fascinating and discursive, as I noted when I wrote about it here. #28: Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler. Karen is a fellow guest at SFRA, so I suppose there's an extraneous reason for reading her new novel now, but in fact I would have read it anyway since she is one of the handful of writers whose new books I will try to read as soon as I get my hands on them. This well lives up to expectations, a novel informed by the acute but often oblique wit that was such a feature of The Jane Austen Book Club, and filled with the same critique of women as communal beings that is to be found in everything she writes. I've noticed, for example, that there is practically never a single narrative viewpoint in her work, the reader is always forced to assume a communal perspective. Hmm, I must pursue this idea further. #29: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers. Continuing my belated encounter with Lord Peter Wimsey. The first time I ever went into a bell loft in a church I remember being scared of the beasts, and I realised as I read the book that the fear must have sprung from an early encounter with this story, perhaps an old TV adaptation because I'm pretty sure I've not read the novel before. In some ways this is the most and the least satisfying of her novels that I've read to date. The most satisfying because the mystery element is more intriguing and plays a larger part in the story than the others I've read. Least satisfying because what has fascinated me about Sayers is that the crime is usually just a vehicle for a novel about some aspect of contemporary life, and the novelistic aspects of The Nine Tailors really isn't very strong. There are observations about the nature of rural life and the influence of the church, but these seem pallid compared to, say, the observations on advertising in Murder Must Advertise. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
7:08 am	Dr Who is ridiculous Indeed, barely a month after the [Post Office] tower had been opened to the public, it was playing a central role in the BBC's science-fiction series Doctor Who. In 'The War Machines', which began in June 1966, the Doctor and his friends find themselves in contemporary London, a place of dolly birds, swinging nightclubs and a megalomaniac computer, WOTAN, which controls an army of War Machines from its headquarters at the summit of the Post Office Tower. Unfortunately, BBC research suggested that the show's six million viewers were less than impressed, largely because audiences found that 'the whole idea of a computer able to think for itself, and with power over human beings as well as machines, was "preposterous"'. 'I like science fiction,' said one disgruntled viewer, 'but this is ridiculous.' Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat, pp42-3 (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 27th, 2008
9:50 am	The Death of the Author Conversation over chocolates and champagne last night turned, as such things do, to Roland Barthes. brisingamen was saying that the notion of the death of the author was still a relevant idea, and I realised it was something I'd actually experienced. This is going to be old hat to everyone who's had books published before, but I recognised that now What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction is out there, I as the author am in a sense dead to the book. It's difficult to explain. All the reviews the book has attracted so far have been good, positive reviews. I've been pleased at the praise it has attracted. Yet every single one of the reviews has said at least one thing about the book that I do not recognise, that was not the book as I remember it. It's different in every review, I am not saying that they have all picked up on something that slipped my attention; no, they are interpreting things I say in ways that make perfect sense but aren't exactly what I believed I was saying. And then some other reviewer comes along and interprets the same thing exactly the way I intended, but misinterprets something else. The thing is, no matter how carefully you say something the English language is a remarkably imprecise tool. You will always leave yourself open to interpretation. And that's what the book is for. I can do nothing further. I must simply step back and let the book carry on its conversation with the readers. Which is, I suppose, why authors should never respond to their reviews. The author of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction is dead. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
10:24 am	15 years ago today ... ( ... ) (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
7:50 pm	And there is another review of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, this time at Jonathan McCalmont's new venture, Fruitless Recursion. (Comment on this)
1:10 pm	Paradigm Shift Nothing quite changes the way you view your place in the world like the discovery that events you remember, that seem current, are actually history, the stuff of research and archives and theories and uncertainty. This uncomfortable readjustment has been most vividly brought home to me by reading Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. It's huge, superbly written and fascinating, and it covers the years between 1956 (when I turned four) and 1964 (when I was in my first year at Grammar School), and it's written by someone who wasn't born until ten years after the events he relates. ( A longish discussion of the book follows ... ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
10:22 am	Block I like to do things in their proper order. If I am committed to doing one thing, I prefer to finish the job before moving on to the next thing. This is particularly true of writing, I can't meet deadline b if I've still got deadline a hanging over me. This is usually not much of a problem, since I like to get things done well ahead of deadline wherever possible. But sometimes ... I committed to writing an article about Robert Holdstock last year. I knew what I wanted to write about, so it was just a matter of doing the research and getting the thing written. Except it didn't work out like that. Even on the best day I wasn't managing more than 200 words, an unbearably slow rate for me. I'm the sort of writer who has to have a title first, even if I change the title later. This time I couldn't come up with a title until the essay was practically finished. Everything seemed to be conspiring to get between me and the finished essay, and that was pushing other writing commitments further and further back and making me grumpy and miserable at the same time. Last week, after a supreme effort of will power, I finished the first draft. Only about eight months late. I gave the draft to MKS, and she immediately saw why I had been struggling with the piece (why can we never see that ourselves when we're writing it?). So the two of us go away, think about it, and independently come up with the same revised structure for the essay. And over the weekend the essay that had taken eight months of struggle virtually rewrote itself in two days. Not only that, but getting that first draft out of the way the log jam cleared, and in the week since I've also produced some 5,000 words of other stuff (a bookslut column, two-and-a-half reviews). Now, finally, I can start thinking about the paper I'm due to deliver at SFRA in (gulp) less than a month. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
9:26 am	I've been cloned ... or at least my bank card has been. I've had a lot of big bills to pay recently, but even so my bank account seemed to be going down faster than it should. Last night I found out why. Someone in France had merrily taken a rather large chunk of money out of my account. In fact a rather larger chunk than was actually in the account. So I phoned Barclays, who were sort of efficient. They have stopped the card so the cloners can't use it any more - though that means that I can't use it either, which is a little bit of a problem right now. I should get the new one within five days, I hope. And then I fill in a form and then they investigate and then, assuming all goes well, the money is paid back into my account (without, I assume, any overdraft charges). I understand they have to do this for security reasons, but it does rather make me feel doubly the victim. And having sorted through all that the guy at the call centre tried to sell me a new account. "It will earn you interest as long as you are in credit." So how much does it cost? "Only £3 a month, you'll make more than that in interest." Yes and the last time I had an interest-earning account with Barclays I earned a little over £1 a quarter, so what wonderous new rate of interest are they paying? I very politely turned him down. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 30th, 2008
12:13 pm	What we do Another review of my book has appeared, at Blog of the Fallen. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
7:23 am	That sci fi gets everywhere Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain is pretty much what you might expect from a political journalist, gossipy, focussed on personalities, solidly researched, very readable and above all sticking to the political subject, the political interpretation. So it is something of a surprise, in the middle of a discussion of Atlee's post-war Labour government and their attitude towards the Empire, to come upon this passage: There was talk of a new Commonwealth airways system, linking the social democratic worldwide web of the future. (An echo of this lost dream can be found in the writings of the fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock, who speculated about a liberal, anti-racist British commonwealth linked by huge fleets of airships.) I confess, Moorcock is not exactly the first author that would have come to my mind in a discussion of post-war British and Imperial politics. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
10:53 am	Brisingamen has left the country ... Well, not quite. As I type this she is sitting in the departure lounge at heathrow terminal 3. Apparently she got through check-in and security in about 25 minutes, which must be some sort of record at Heathrow. My regards to all of you heading to Wiscon. Just don't tell me how good it is. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
1:37 pm	Hmm ellen_datlow objects to my review of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007, which is fair enough. I find myself somewhat less sanguine with nihilistic_kid's ad hominem response. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 16th, 2008
10:11 am	I seem to be collecting awards ... Not winning them, alas, but working on them. I've administered the Hugos; I've counted and presented the BSFA Awards; I've administered the Clarke Award; I've judged the Pioneer ... And now I've just accepted an invitation to join the jury for the John W. Campbell memorial award. Every Award is idiosyncratic, but this one seems more so than most. How many other awards have given their top award to 'No Award', and then put a book in second place? The Campbell has done that twice! How many other awards have given their top prize to a book published years before because it had been neglected and there was nothing worthy of winning in the year they were judging? And yet, radical as they can be, the Campbell jury has been extraordinarily conservative at times. I think our jury discussions are going to be interesting. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 5th, 2008
7:04 am	The first review of What it is we do when we read science fiction. And many thanks to ninebelow. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
6:43 am	Plus ca change Last night I came across this passage: A's fortunes as Prime Minister were not helped by the fact that his predecessor had lingered so long in Downing Street. By the time he finally succeeded to the top job, A was past his peak of vigour and imagination, and problems were mounting at home. He inherited a stuttering economy ... B himself doubted A's capacity to govern; the night before his own resignation, he remarked: 'I don't believe A can do it.' His chief lieutenants, C and D, the Chancellor and Foreign Secretary respectively, were not close to him and had prime ministerial ambitions of their own. C's handling of the economy was less than competent; after cutting income tax in a pre-election budget spree, he was forced to reverse his generosity ... and hitch taxes back up in order to fight off pressure on the pound. In fact, A is Anthony Eden, B is Churchill, C is Rab Butler and D is Harold Macmillan (the passage is from Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook), but isn't it tempting to insert the names Brown, Blair, Darling and Milliband? (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
11:14 am	March & April books I missed posting this last month, hence the doubling up today. It's also been a period when a variety of things (jury service, illness, work, etc) have got in the way of my reading, so I'm running a little behind my schedule. It doesn't help that a couple of these books are very big indeed. Anyway, for what it's worth this is what I've got through in the last couple of months: #11 Brasyl by Ian McDonald. Okay, I understand what all the fuss was about and I think it was perverse that it didn't make the Clarke shortlist, but I still think River of Gods was the better book, mostly because I don't think the three stories that make up this volume are all of equal weight, and they don't merge enough for the stronger ones to carry the weaker. #12 The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007 edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin Grant. Read for review at SF Site. As usual with this series it often seems like a case of never mind the quality, feel the width. Too many stories, not all of which by any means deserve being described as 'best'. If this really is representative of the short fiction published in 2006 (and I have no reason to doubt it), then it was a fairly lacklustre year; only 'Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter' by Geoff Ryman really screams out at you as being a great story. I also had an impression that too many of the stories, particularly the horror stories, were relying on old literary models, relying rather on familiarity than freshness for their impact. #13 Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain by Stefan Collini. I've been working my way through this book for most of the last year. It is dense and slow, but fascinating and worth the effort. An extraordinary history of something we talk about freely without ever defining. It seems that the intellectual, in whichever country you are in, is always a phenomenon associated with somewhere else. It is also something we tend to denigrate, as if we are generally afraid of any show of intelligence. #14 Swiftly by Adam Roberts. Reviewed for Interzone, and I'm also engaged in an email discussion of the book so I don't really want to say too much more about it here. #15 His Illegal Self by Peter Carey. It's becoming almost a cliche how Carey uses characters outside the law as a way of writing about Australia (just think of recent titles: True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, Theft), he also seems to look for a different voice to tell at least part of the story of each book (the uneducated Irishman in Kelly Gang, the sub-normal brother in Theft). So this time around we have a young woman on the fringes of the US underground in the early 70s who is charged with taking a seven-year-old boy she once babysat to visit his mother who is a leader of a Weathermen-type group, but the mother is killed in a bomb incident and the woman finds herself accused of kidnapping: hence the illegal part of the story. As for the voice, somewhat over half the chapters are narrated by the boy. The two end up fleeing to a hippy commune in Queensland, so we get a story of urban sophisticates meet rural Australia. If this makes it sound Carey by numbers, there is a sense of the book being underdeveloped, particularly in the early part, though as it goes on and the character particularly of the woman grows, it becomes a better book. Still it is not one of his best. #16 The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright, which I've already written about here. #17 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. This is the only one of Sayers's novels I've read before I started working my way through them recently, it was back in my teenage years when I was deeply into crime fiction, and I found it a tremendous disappointment. Now I understand why, it is barely a crime novel at all. That is just the excuse for a novel about the social consequences of the First World War, which is fascinating but not what I expected back then. #18 The Invention of Dr Cake by Andrew Motion, which I've already written about here. #19 The Best of Lucius Shepard. Read for review at SF Site. A curious collection, around half the book is made up of stories from the first eight years of his career; the second half is made up of stories from the last eight years; with nothing from the eight years in between (his Hugo winning 'Barnacle Bill the Spacer' is one of the notable omissions). I also note that the more recent stories, though all longer, contain less of the sense of physicality that was such a feature of stories like 'R&R' or 'The Jaguar Hunter'. But you can't really argue with anything from Shepard. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
9:55 am	The Invention of Dr Cake When Andrew Motion's novella came out a few years ago I was sufficiently impressed with the reviews to get hold of a copy, but it then sat around unread and unregarded for ages. I'm sorry now that I took so long to get to the book. Anyone who knows my taste in literature will know that I appreciate intellectual puzzles and books that make the reader do much of the work, and this is a prime example. It begins with Motion himself speaking, and thereby blurring the lines between fiction and biography. He talks about how he came across the subject of his previous book, Wainewright the Poisoner, as someone who appeared in the background of something else he had been researching; and in the background of his researches into Wainewright he started coming across another interesting character, the medical reformer and occasional romantic poet Dr Tabor. Starting to consider a book about Tabor, he then came across an even more shadowy figure in the background of Tabor's story, the little-known Dr Cake. But practically all that could be discovered about Dr Cake was in some writings by Tabor. ( Here be spoilers, enter at your peril ... ) (Comment on this)
9:24 am	Have the Neo-Cons won? A year or so back, with the failure in Iraq and the removal of Rumsfeld and others from the Bush administration and a number of neo-cons publicly changing their tune, I thought that the hard right was in retreat and the world was once again going to be safe for liberal democracy, or whatever. Now I'm not so sure. The problem is not the demise of the neo-cons - I'm pretty comfortable that that's happening. It's the demise of liberalism, or rather the split in the ranks of the liberals. It is a split inspired by neo-con rhetoric, and perhaps engineered by them, so that in the end, although they are a spent force politically, I think they might still have won the war. These thoughts are inspired by a review in Saturday's Guardian of a new collection of essays by Tony Judt, Reappraisals. I've come across some though by no means all of those essays before, but I've also increasingly come across the ideas behind these essays in a variety of places. In effect these ideas are a backlash against the liberal consensus of the last half century, but they are a backlash coming from what would once have been a part of that consensus. The most visible manifestation of this split is the absolute and seemingly unbridgeable divide that has now opened up between the liberal hawks and the liberal doves, a split that developed in response to the Iraq war. In Britain the most prominent representative of the liberal hawks is probably Nick Cohen. Once he was a left winger, but increasingly his pronouncements sound as if they are coming from the loonier extremes of the right, yet the whole intellectual development is logical and coherent once you accept his basic premise that the war in Iraq was right. The argument then runs that the war was correct because it was attacking 'Islamofascists' (a term that has really only come into use in the wake of the Iraq war), since they have been defined as fascists they are de facto bad guys, therefore all their doings and manifestations are bad, therefore every increase in authoritarianism is justified as part of the desperate ongoing battle for survival, and therefore everyone who criticises the war or its aftermath or Israeli actions etc is defending the indefensible and must be shouted down. However, the arguments of the liberal doves can be just as crazy. Since the end of the Cold War, they argue, America has had too much power in the world and has behaved in an immoral and immoderate way, this in turn led them into war for no justifiable reason, therefore anyone who stands against America is ipso facto in the right. Which has led elements of the left to support unquestioningly anyone in the Islamic world who is anti-American. Well no, life isn't as simple as that and there are anti-American Islamists whose every other pronouncement should be morally repugnant to anyone on the left; anti-Americanism alone could never be enough to make anyone a hero of the left. Similarly the fact that I find the actions of the Bush administration (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, waterboarding, etc, etc) beneath contempt does not mean that I hate America, and it does not make me an unquestioning ally of Iran, the Taliban, Hamas, Al Qaida, or what have you. The trouble is that the split, whether or not it was engineered by the neo-cons, is driving the two liberalisms not just further apart but increasingly to the right. There are liberal hawks who are starting to sound like neo-cons; there are liberal doves who are starting to sound like 'Islamofascists'. And the anti-liberal backlash coming from the ranks of liberalism is now reaching back, to attack people like Eric Hobsbawm for fellow travelling, and to rehabilitate Whittaker Chambers. (Rehabilitate Whittaker Chambers? Whatever next, reinstate McCarthy as a hero of the people?) Is the aim of liberalism now to undermine every intellectual justification for liberalism? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 14th, 2008
10:36 am	The invention of space About a year ago my study was a mess. I had scrappy shelves against three walls, but couldn't actually get at most of them because there were three ranks of boxes piled at least four deep in front of the shelves. A good proportion of the books (and practically everything we'd acquired over the previous three or so years) had never been on a shelf. We didn't know half of what we'd got, and when we did know we couldn't find it. ( And so ... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)