Writing for New Scientist magazine, US science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson thinks British science fiction is in a golden age, with a huge number of active and talented writers producing work on the cutting edge of the genre. He also thinks it’s time it won some literary awards.

“Many recent British science fiction novels describe the near future, creating a kind of anticipatory realism, the best description of the first decade of this century. Others venture into the depths of distant space and time, creating a new space opera that is not only sophisticated entertainment, but also usually a surreal allegory for the choices we have to make as a civilisation and a species. Some even explore what I think is the hardest zone of all (which is why I asked the writers here to give it a go) – the time about a century from now, when our growing capabilities will be confronted by immense dangers, creating an unstable and unpredictable future.

“The result is the best British literature of our time.”

Read the full article, plus short fiction from eight leading British SF writers, by following the link here.

James Maxey reviews the Future Bristol anthology for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Of my contribution, he writes:

“The strongest part of the story is the budding love story between the narrator and a girl he meets in a bookstore. I found the dialogue to be very natural and plausible; often dialogue in short stories is simply there to push the plot forward. Here, the dialogue has nothing to do with the gee-whiz tech that will erupt a few pages later. As a result, it felt very real to me. It seemed like the way people actually flirt, and makes the story feel like an actual window onto life.”

Read the full review online here.

Apologies for the lack of writing updates. Trust me, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. I’ve been spending most of my free time hammering away at my next novel and I’ve made significant progress. At the same time, I’ve written detailed outlines for two brand new, action-packed short stories, and submitted a third new story to market.

With these new stories, I have enough material for a second short story collection.

Regular readers will know that I recently submitted a short story to the forthcoming Newcon Press anthology, Conflicts. The story has now been edited by Ian Whates and Ian Watson and looks on course for publication later in the year.

It’s always fun to set stories in your hometown, because you can use locations you know intimately and that familiarity can add an extra authenticity to your writing. You don’t have to imagine a setting because you can visit it and walk around in it. You can see the stage on which your characters will play out their scenes.

However, doing so can also cause problems. You can fall into the trap of assuming too much knowledge on behalf of your readers. If you set a story against a local landmark and they’ve never visited it, they might not get the significance you assume it’s bringing to your story. They might miss the details you take for granted. In your mind’s eye, you might be constructing the most dramatic scene you’ve ever imagined – but if the reader doesn’t know enough about the locale to picture it in their own mind, if you’re not describing it properly, all your hard work will be wasted. You have to take a step back and ensure you’re being fair to them, that you’re avoiding in-jokes and describing the scene the same way you would if you were describing one on Mars or Jupiter, and not letting your familiarity with the scene blind you to the reader’s needs.

On the other hand, it can be just as difficult to set stories in exotic or imaginary locales. You still have the same duty to describe the scene vividly, whether it’s Buenos Aires, Tokyo or the dark side of Moon.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about the SF genre is the way it can transport you to some other time or place and fire your imagination so you feel you’ve been there and experienced something above and beyond your everyday routine. What you have to do as a writer is make sure you treat your local environment the same way – because it may well be exotic and mysterious to some of your readers.

For instance, I recently co-wrote a short story with another writer, set in Paris, a city I’ve visited only twice in my life, but one in which the other writer has lived for many years. While she felt at home writing about the streets and boulevards, I had to use Google Earth to obtain detailed aerial photographs of the locations and routes we were using in the story, to give me the insight I needed to produce credible descriptions of the scenery the characters found themselves passing through.

Blog posts have been thin on the ground this last week because I’ve finally started work on my next novel – working title: The Recollection. So far, I’ve written a first draft of the first four chapters and the thing’s starting to gain a momentum of its own.

From the synopsis:

The Recollection is a character-driven science fiction novel placing modern twenty-first century men and women into a far-future, action-packed space opera setting. The story has two interwoven strands: one set in contemporary London and the other in space, on board the trading starship Ameline, three hundred years hence

If you’re a sci-fi writer or reader, it can be extremely frustrating and difficult to explain the genre’s appeal to colleagues, friends and loved ones who just “don’t get it”. Take my wife and my mother, for example. While they’ve both been incredibly supportive of my writing career to date, neither can honestly see the appeal of science fiction and I get the feeling both secretly wish I’d write something more “mainstream”.

So, if you have people in your life like this, what can you do to convert them?

The temptation is to shower them with the books you enjoyed when you first started reading sci-fi, way back when – books by writers such as Asimov, Clarke, Niven and Dick – in the hope they’ll see whatever it was you saw first time you read it, and become hooked on the genre the same way you did.

This is not a good idea.

Don’t use the classics. In most cases, the technology, sociology and sexual politics have dated so badly you’ll end up totally alienating your potential convert, despite your fond memories of the book. Better, I think, to start with something modern, something with which they can feel a connection. To this end, I’ve knocked together the list below -  a list of books which manage to combine science fiction tropes and themes with modern storytelling techniques and sensibilities.

In much the same way as Life on Mars and the new Battlestar Galactica attracted non-sci-fi audiences through their gritty storylines and examination of contemporary issues of terrorism and freedom, so these books may be capable of drawing in readers who wouldn’t normally expect to enjoy a sci-fi novel:

1. 9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. For viewers of Life on Mars and The Wire, this is an intriguing blend of crime drama and medical speculation, in which Sergeant Bobby Zha of the SFPD has to work out not only who murdered him, but also why he’s woken up in the body of a coma patient from New York.
2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.  Written as an educational young adult novel, Little Brother shows a group of computer-savvy school children caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, and tells how they fight to regain their civil liberties following a government crack-down.
3. Nova Swing by M John Harrison. A generation ago, part of the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract fell to earth in the coastal city of Saudade. Now, years later, Vic Serotonin makes his living guiding tourists into the event site – a place where the laws of geometry and causality have assumed a dream-like elasticity. To Vic, the event site is a puzzle and an obsession – one that literally spills over into the external world when he illegally smuggles an unstable artefact out of the zone.
4. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Morgan takes Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and projects it several hundred years into the future, delivering a violent and absorbing mystery set on the streets of Bay City.
5. Jennifer Government by Max Barry. A no-holds-barred satire on multinational big business, Jennifer Government starts with marketing executives shooting teenagers in order to give their new line of trainers some “street cred”.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. There are other “gateway” books out there that could lure the unsuspecting into an appreciation of science fiction – books like The Time Traveller’s Wife or The Road, which use the tools of sci-fi to add spice to apparently “mainstream” novels.

But what do you think? Which books have I missed? Drop your suggestions in the comments below…