Category: News & events

Thoughts on America City

I’m thinking about this book because I’ve been asked to join a book club in Alaska by Zoom next month to talk about it. Several things about this are rather out of the ordinary.

First, it’s in Alaska!

Second, the book is set in America, and Alaska is in America, a country where I’ve spent a total of one week, and that week nowhere near any of the places that are the setting of the book. Americans might quite understandably feel I’m writing about something I know very little about. (Luckily I’ve met this book club before, and I know they are very nice).

Thirdly, both I and the members of the book club will be aware that many of the events in the book seem to be beginning to unfold right now, e.g, (a) President Trump making extraordinarily hostile and aggressive statements about his neighbour and ally, Canada, while also stating that the border is an artificial one (which is what Putin says about Ukraine) and that Canada ought to join America as its 51st state. (There is something particularly insulting, I feel, about suggesting that Canada, which is slightly bigger than the whole of America, and has more than 10% of its population, should join as a single state!) (b) Trump threatening the use of military force if another ally, Denmark, does not hand Greenland over to America. I’m not going to spell out exactly how close these things are to what happens in the book, but suffice to say the parallels are striking (and alarming), and I think Trump’s motivation for these threats are quite similar to Slaymaker’s. If you want to get elected you have to give your voters something, and one of the things you can give them is an enemy.

I wrote about the origins of this book here, and also here, but here are a few more thoughts.

Continue reading “Thoughts on America City”

To the Stars and Back: stories in honour of Eric Brown

Cover image: To the Stars and Back

I’m proud and pleased to have had a story selected for this collection, which has been put together by Ian Whates at Newcon Press in honour of the late Eric Brown who died last year.

Eric was well-known and well-loved in the British science fiction world. He was a warm, gentle, unassuming man without a trace of arrogance or pretentiousness, and was an exceptionally prolific writer, not just in science fiction, but in many genres including children’s books and crime novels. Yet he’d never read a book until he was in his teens, when he first encountered the work of Agatha Christie. This (as Eric described it) opened up what felt like a magical and entirely new world to him to which he proceeded to dedicate himself, as a reader, writer and reviewer.

The stories in this collection are written by some of his many writer friends. Some of them (I’ve only read a couple so far) refer directly to Eric and his world. Mine doesn’t, but I like to think it’s a story he would have approved of, and perhaps even one that he might have written. It’s called ‘The Peaceable Kingdom.’

Here is the Guardian’s obituary for Eric (who was the paper’s SF critic for many years). The book is available now.

Let loose

Here I am (on the right) signing copies of the Ballard-themed anthology, Reports from the Deep End at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday. To my right are Maxim Jakubowski (who co-edited the book with Rick McGrath, as well as contributed to it), Pat Cadigan and Andrew Hook. Why do we SF people have such a preference for wearing black?

Chemo has made me even balder than usual. I’ve even lost all my nostril hairs. (This makes my nose drip suddenly and without warning, which can be embarrassing). But I’ve had my last dose of those horrible toxins and am on the way up. I came down to London on the train which I wouldn’t have attempted even a week earlier. It felt great to be doing things again.

Reports from the Deep End: a J. G. Ballard Tribute Anthology

I’m delighted to have a story in this Ballard-themed anthology, which will be out in the autumn (Nov 7th) – and in some very fine company too. I’m a big admirer of Ballard, particularly his short stories.

My contribution to this collection is called ‘Art App’. Ballard was an exceptionally painterly writer. His stories are not primarily driven by plot or character development, but by the accumulation and arrangement of very powerful images. I tried to honour Ballard’s attachment to Surrealist art and, in particular, to the work of Max Ernst, whose peculiar vision I only really became aware of as a result of reading Ballard.

The Eye of Silence, by Max Ernst

Tomorrow giveaway

Tomorrow is out in paperback today.

Many thanks to all the people who wrote to me in response to my offer to give away 12 free copies to celebrate.

I’m applying a very complex algorithm (?!) to those requests to decide on the winners (it includes such important metrics as ‘did the requester come from the same town as my grandfather?’) and will be sending out copies tomorrow.

If you weren’t successful, my apologies – I only have a limited number of copies to give away – and thanks very much for your interest anyway.

Two Tribes: Harry and Michelle (paperback publication day post)

Although told from 250 years in the future, the main part of this book deals with a Cambridge-educated North London architect (Harry), and his relationship with a hairdresser from a small town in Norfolk who left school at 16 (Michelle).

When I described this to my friend Ian, his immediate reaction was ‘well, that would never happen’. You’d need to read the book to judge whether he was necessarily right, but it’s interesting, I think, that such a relationship seems so unlikely. I’m sure he wouldn’t have reacted in that way, if for example, I’d said the book was about a relationship between Harry and another architect who had, say, an Indian Hindu background. Nothing particularly unlikely about that. Which suggests to me that the cultural gap between different ‘cultures’ is actually smaller than the cultural gap between different classes.

Over much of my lifetime there was a kind of alliance between Harry’s class (which is also my own) -the liberal professional class- and the working class, both of which tended to vote Labour (just as both tended to vote Democrat in the US). In recent years, and notably in the Brexit vote, that alliance has fallen apart. Isn’t that what we really mean by the rise of ‘populism’? And that was the background against which I wanted to foreground Michelle and Harry’s relationship.

Two Tribes on Hive.

Two Tribes on Amazon

Two Tribes in paperback

Two Tribes is out in paperback this week, so here’s a short post to celebrate. (More info about the book here.)

This is a book with a simple moral, which (adapting Solzhenistyn) could be summed up as ‘The line between good and evil does not pass between those who like the European Union and those who don’t.’

Or: ‘It’s a mistake to assume you’re one of the good guys, just because you and your friends think you are. Pretty much everyone thinks their lot are the good guys.’

Or: ‘Just because someone doesn’t agree with you about politics, doesn’t make them a monster.’

Although mainly set in the aftermath of Brexit, it isn’t really about Brexit. It’s about social class, and specifically about the complicated relationship between the liberal middle classes and the working classes in Britain, and the way that relationship is changing.

I’m very proud of it.

Here’s another moral. ‘When there is more than one elite, each elite condemns the elitism of the others, but denies its own.’

Two Tribes on Hive.

Two Tribes on Amazon

Zoom book group

I’m looking forward to being a guest at a book group in Alaska this weekend. I won’t be physically present obviously (I wish I could be, the people who have invited me live in a place that looks absolutely amazing – see below). I’ll be joining them by Zoom.

For me getting used to meeting people via video link has been one of the upsides of the pandemic. It’s a technology that’s been around for some time, but I would never have thought of using it before this year. Yet, I’m not just using it as a substitute for meeting people in the flesh, I’m taking part in social events that previously wouldn’t have happened at all.

If you have a book group that’s meeting by Zoom and are looking at one of my books, feel free to contact me via this site.

The anticipated drive to Homer Alaska - Life's Next Adventures
Homer, Alaska.

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