My favourite books published in 2010 have been:

• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks. Starting with a seemingly insignificant murder and then pulling back the focus to see how its repurcussions affect politics on a galactic scale, Surface Detail sees the utopian Culture going up against more religiously traditional civilisations in an effort to wipe out their sadistic electronic afterlives.

• Zero History by William Gibson. Almost the antithesis of Banks’s book, Zero History eschews a futuristic setting, instead focusing its action in London in 2009, as various characters struggle to unearth the clues that will lead them to the designer of a “secret” clothing brand.

• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Beukes repeats the success of her debut Moxyland, this time bringing us a gritty urban fantasy set in South Africa, and a tough, likeable heroine searching for some kind of absolution amidst the crime and struggle of everyday life.

Some books change the world. Read at the right time, they have the power to change our thinking, to inspire us, and to change our lives. When we put them down, we are no longer the same people we were when we picked them up.

The books listed below are the books that have had the greatest impact on my life and my development as a writer. I’m not claiming that they’re the best books ever written (that’s a topic for a different article); but each holds a special place in my heart, and each has contributed something to the way I now see my relationship with the world around me. If I hadn’t read them when I did, I wouldn’t be the same person I am today.

Some books change the world; and these are the books that changed mine.

Continue reading “Five Books That Changed My World”

If you missed it, you can now use this link to view an online recording of Wednesday night’s talk by William Gibson at the Watershed in Bristol.

www.dshed.net/william-gibson

Last night, I was fortunate enough to see William Gibson speak at the Watershed in Bristol. He read a chapter from his latest novel, Zero History, and then answered questions for about an hour. His replies were entertaining, thorough, and frequently self-depreciating. At one point he liked his most famous novel Neuromancer (1984) to a Chinese dragon costume, saying it was all shiny and dancing on the outside, but the man inside (him) saw only the Chinese newspaper and balsa wood from which it was made.

Continue reading “William Gibson at the Watershed”

On 6 October William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Zero History, will be appearing at the Watershed in Bristol, as part of the city’s Festival of Ideas, and I have tickets to see him! This is a big deal for me, as the freewheeling spirit of Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome was one of the inspirations for my short story The Last Reef, which helped me break into Interzone and led in turn to the publication of my first short story collection, The Last Reef and Other Stories.

Last week John DeNardo, the editor of SF Signal, asked me to write about the books that changed my life. The resulting article is now available to read on the website..

Click here to read ‘Five Books That Changed My World’.

Here’s a snippet of an interview I gave yesterday to Ann Wilkes at Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys:

“I grew up at a time when the Cold War seemed likely to turn hot at any moment. We were shown “Protect and Survive” films at school, and I remember that the local doctor’s surgery had leaflets about nuclear fallout and guidelines for the disposal of relatives who’d succumbed to radiation sickness. As a teenager, it was a scary time. It was hard enough dealing with all the emotional stuff teenagers have to go through normally, without the added worry that the world was about to end. I guess a lot of that fear worked its way into my psyche. Part of me still expects society to fall apart at any given moment, and so those stories are to a certain extent an exploration and exorcism of that fear – a way of confronting my personal demons.”

You can read the full interview here: Interview with Gareth L Powell

Charles Stross recently wrote something on his blog that I really disagree with:

We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.

The thrust of his argument is that the international situation is changing so rapidly that any book of near-future SF written today will be obsolete before it can be published, much as many Cold War thrillers were rendered obsolete by the sudden end of the Cold War.

That’s a fair point. But I don’t agree that you can then extrapolate from here to say that it’s now impossible to write near-future SF. Sure, times are challenging and it’s tough to make predictions about the near-future geo-political and economic landscape - but the role of SF is so much wider than that.

For me, the two purposes of any kind of fiction are:

1. To entertain
2. To say something about the human condition, about what it means to be alive, here and now.

If you’re writing about characters, about people and what makes them tick, then whether you set your story ten, twenty or fifty years into the future, you’ll still find people falling in love, trying to earn a living, screwing each other over, and hanging out with their friends… things they’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Those basic primate sex, power and death motivations will still be there.

I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.

After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.

For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.

Greg Bear’s novel Eon was first published in 1985, a year after Neuromancer, and assumes the tension between the USA and USSR continues until the year 2000, and then erupts into a full-scale nuclear war. Does that mean we can’t read it now, in 2008? Obviously not, or Orion Books wouldn’t be re-releasing it with an arty new cover. The fact is, Bear’s book is an epic adventure with the pace of a thriller and characters that draw the reader’s sympathy – so it doesn’t matter that he got a few details wrong, any more than it matters that Orwell’s vision of 1984 didn’t come to pass in that particular year.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s always been difficult to make accurate predictions of the near future, but that’s no reason to stop doing it. As long as your story’s based on more than simple prediciton, and if it’s an entertaining tale with involving characters and a serious point to make, it’s worth writing. You may get some aspects of the future wrong – but so what? As long as you give it your best shot, no-one can ask more of you than that.