Australian writer Rowena Cory Daniells has just posted an interview she did with me recently, in which we talk about my new book, the music I listen to while writing, and much more–including a discussion on why Fantasy is often wrongly perceived as a boy’s club.

Here’s part of my answer to her question:

“I don’t believe that there is a difference in the way that men and women approach the craft of writing genre fiction. If there is a difference between the sexes, it’s in the reception their writing receives. The latest figures I’ve seen seem to indicate that men and women are fairly evenly represented when it comes to the number of authors currently writing genre fiction; however, the male writers seem to get more reviews and more exposure than the females, which is obviously grossly unfair—especially in a genre that prides itself on its open-mindedness.”

Read the full interview here.

We live in a hyper-connected global meta-civilisation. A crisis in one country ripples out to affect every other. The pervasive technologies of the developed world, such as the Internet and mobile phone, are in the process of revolutionising the way young people communicate and organise themselves in developing countries–and as science fiction writers, it falls to us to predict the consequences.

This argument is beautifully illustrated in this article by Ghanan science fiction author Jonathan Dotse, where he writes:

“… the youth of the developing world today are being shaped by far more radical technologies to which they now have unprecedented access. The result is the rise of a completely different mindset from the ones that has dominated the developing world until very recently; a growing recognition among these youth of the immense potential for science and technology to induce tangible social change.”

I’ve recently encountered similar sentiments in Ian McDonald’s Brasyl; Zoo City and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes; and the Arabesk trilogy by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I expect to encounter them again in Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Wind Up Girl, which is set in Thailand; and McDonald’s Dervish House, set in Istanbul.

Personally, I’ve set short stories in the slums of the Mediterranean and the barrios of Buenos Aires; but these are just the start. From where we’re standing now, the future looks like it’s going to be built using technologies that have been bought, stolen, hacked and repurposed. The world of trade will be dominated by the hungry economies of Asia and the Far East; the spread of instant global communication will facilitate the birth and dissemination of radical new ideas (as seen in Egypt and Libya); and our work and personal lives are going to change, merge and reinvent themselves.

This is a time of both great opportunity and great peril. Communications and surveillance technologies that promise to liberate one population could be used to ruthlessly surpress another. International tensions will be sparked by the renegotiation of the global hierarchy in the face of the changing physical and economic climates. As science fiction writers, we should be looking around the world for the likely flash points of these coming changes. If, as I said at the beginning of this post, we live in a global meta-civilisation, we should reflect that in our writing. It’s no longer enough to write comfortable Western-centric yarns of American manifest destiny writ large. The world has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. The models that served us in the 1960s and 1970s no longer apply.

As Dotse says in his conclusion:

“Youths from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa represent the single largest subgroup of the human population, and with the aid of advanced technology they will go on to shape the geopolitical destiny of our civilization. Science fiction has a lot of catching up to do in order to chronicle this new frontier in which the developing world plays a defining role; a frontier that has been neglected by mainstream science fiction for just about long enough.”

You can read the full article here.

The following article originally appeared in The Irish Times:

THE FUTURE IS NOW
By Gareth L Powell

WITH FILMS such as Avatar, Star Trek and Iron Man 2 all doing well at the box office, and shows such as Doctor Who, Life On Mars, Battlestar Galactica and Lost attracting respectable audiences on TV and DVD, there’s no question that the general public has an appetite for visual science fiction and fantasy. Printed science fiction and fantasy, on the other hand, has traditionally been less fortunate. For years, it has had to struggle hard to transcend its pulp roots and be taken seriously as a genre of literature.

Continue reading “The Future Is Now”

I rather like this quote from JG Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life:

“Above all, science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled away from the modernist novel. It was a visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.”

It reminds me of something I wrote and posted here a while back:

“Good science fiction should blow a reader’s socks off. It should take that whole cupboard of toys and use it to tell stories that just can’t be told within the confines of mainstream literature. And in an increasingly bizarre world, maybe SF is the only literature capable of addressing the things we see on the news every night: cyber terrorism; stem cell therapy; cloning; urban decay; 24 hour surveillance; global pandemics; etc. Which could be why more and more “mainstream” writers are finding themselves having to borrow from SF’s toy cupboard in order to tell their stories. But more than all that, it should show readers something they’ve never seen before. It should entertain and stretch their minds, and open them to new possibilities. It should combat prejudice and ignorance. It should  educate and provoke and ask the questions no one else is asking, and it should have something to say about what it means to be human in an increasingly baffling world.”

I spent an enjoyable hour this evening in the bar 0f The Victoria Hotel in Burnham on Sea, being quizzed by members of a local book group about my novel Silversands, which they have been reading.

They were a good bunch of blokes, but while talking to them I was struck by something: when they talked of science fiction books that they’d read, not one of them mentioned anything less than fifty (50) years old!

In their youths, they’d tried reading Asimov, Moorcock, Clarke… and had been put off by the jargon and the concentration on technology at the expense (as they perceived it) of plot and character emotion. Not one of them had read anything by any of the modern authors I tend to use as touchstones: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Richard Morgan, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Lauren Beukes, Bruce Sterling…

To use a musical analogy, it’s as if they’d heard an early 1960s Merseybeat album and disliked it, and from that experience decided that they didn’t like the whole 50 year history of rock music, without ever listening to any of it…

As science fiction writers and fans, we are rightly proud of our genre’s origins and heritage. Yet sometimes those same origins can also be a millstone around our necks, dragging us down.

I recently wrote an article for The Irish Times, in which I warned against the way so-called “classic” science fiction can put off potential readers.

The best advice I can give is that if you have friends who are already lifelong fans of the genre, you should ignore their recommendations.They will be tempted to shower you with the books they enjoyed when they first started reading science fiction, way back when. This is not a good idea. Don’t start with the classics by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc. In most cases, the science, technology, sociology and sexual politics have all dated so badly you’ll end up throwing the book aside in disgust. Better, I think, to start with something modern, something with which you can feel an instant connection.

Through no fault of their own, those early “classics” (and the million derivative works they inspired) helped establish and reinforce the popular perception of science fiction as a pulpy and poorly-written backwater of literature. The only way we’ll escape that legacy is to promote the innovation, literary merit, and relevence of the best modern genre writing.

If you’d like me to visit your book group, drop me a line.

In February 1988, as part of a local arts initiative to encourage young writers,  Diana Wynne Jones reviewed a short story of mine called ‘A Long Way From Home’  and talked me through her comments over a cup of coffee at the Watershed in Bristol. It was the first professional feedback I’d ever received, and contained some invaluable pointers. And most importantly of all, she brooked no nonsense. She made me realise that everything that happened in a story needed to flow logically from the situation and characters and not, as she said, be dropped in by the author like the foot at the end of the Monty Python credits. I still have her handwritten notes in a box in my office, and while I can’t recall the exact words she said, I do remember coming away from the meeting filled with resolve and determination.

Science fiction is less a clearly-defined genre and more a way of looking at the world.

It’s often easier to recognise science fiction when you see it than it is to define it in advance.

Some novels are classed as science fiction because they have an sfnal sensibility, such as William Gibson’s Zero History.

All genres are permeable – Paul Graham Raven

Everything gets everywhere – Ken MacLeod

Following on from yesterday’s post, I can now reveal that I have sold my short story “The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns” to 2020 VISIONS, a near-future science fiction  anthology published through Christopher Fletcher’s M-Brane SF imprint and edited by Rick Novy.

Yesterday, I received word that I’d sold not one but two short stories, to different anthologies on the same day. I can’t tell you yet which anthologies they are, but I can tell you a little something about the stories:

1. ‘Entropic Angel’ is a quasi-supernatural Western set in Somerset in the near future, featuring angels, wind farms, crossbows and hair scrunchies – sort of like Pale Rider meets The Wicker Man.

2. ‘The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns’ is probably best described as a fantasy love story with an Elvis soundtrack. The day after I wrote it, I read the first draft aloud to a room full of students at Bath Spa University, as part of a lecture on creative writing. It  charts the course of the doomed affair between a disillusioned London photographer named Ed and Natalie, the smalltown diner waitress he meets on his way to visit a UFO crash site near the Welsh border.

Futher details of the books will follow as soon as the publishers give me the all-clear to announce them.

I’m currently working on three books – two futher novels and a second short story collection.

Here are the blurbs:

Novel #2:

In modern-day London a small-time criminal falls in love with his brother’s wife. When a mysterious portal opens on a London Underground escalator, he finds he has to put aside his personal feelings in order to rescue the one man standing in the way of his happiness.

Meanwhile, four hundred years in the future, a disgraced daughter has one last chance to redeem herself in the eyes of her family. She must to travel to a remote planet and secure a cargo of precious pharmaceuticals — and the only thing standing in her way is her former lover, the ruthless employee of a rival trading firm.

Novel #3:

In a world where nuclear-powered Zeppelins encircle the globe and electronic ghosts stalk the living, a King lies dying and a half-brained stick fighter struggles to solve a deadly riddle in order to regain her stolen soul.

Short story collection #2:

From the radioactive wastes of Southern England to the vampire-haunted streets of Amsterdam; from the malls of West London to the blasted desolation of a ruined alien city; from a street protest in Paris to the final moments of the human race – these tales put a wicked spin on the world we think we know.

To find out more about any of these books, drop me a line.