Blog, books, stories.
I’ve just found out, two days late, that Dark Eden was The Sunday Times’ SF novel of the year for 2012. I’m very pleased.
Alison Flood, the Sunday Times’ SF reviewer wrote:
“…Written in an extraordinary vernacular, this is a stunning novel and a beautiful evocation of a truly alien world. I have thrust it on countless people this year and they’ve all loved it.
The cover of this month’s Asimov’s illustrates my story The Caramel Forest. It’s by Laura Diehl and I must say I think it’s great.
I’m really excited to announce my new short story collection, to be published by the excellent Newcon Press.
Here’s the front cover, based on the image created by Eugene Kapustiansky for the short story of the same name (first published in Asimov’s SF), when it appeared in translation in the Russian SF magazine Esli. I love it!
‘The Peacock Cloak’ concludes the twelve stories included here. Among the others are ‘Atomic Truth’, ‘The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9’, ‘Johnny’s New Job’, ‘Day 29’ and ‘The Desiccated Man’.
I’m very proud of this collection, and Ian Whates and Newcon Press are doing a beautiful job of it. It will be coming out at Easter.
More details will follow.
Dark Eden was selected as the ‘Big Read’ for the 2012 Green Belt festival (quite an honour, I thought), and I was invited to give a talk there. The talk is available here, though I’m afraid you have to pay for it (as an MP3 or a CD) .
I say ‘talk’. Much of it is actually more of a conversation in which I get to speak the most. As I’ve mentioned before, there were some interesting and original questions asked.
I very much enjoyed meeting Ken MacLeod at the Book Festival: a very clever and likeable man. I was interested to learn that, like one of the main characters in his novel Intrusion, he grew up in the Isle of Lewis. (Is it ‘in’ or ‘on’ with islands? I’m never quite sure. I think perhaps it depends on the size of the island? ‘In Australia’, ‘on Rockall’?)
One of the things that Lewis is known for is the dominance of a strict protestant religion. Ken is clearly an erudite man with a well-stocked mental library, but I was impressed when, while chatting before the session, he reeled off, apropos of what we we talking about, a verbatim quote from an obscure part of the Old Testament. He told me that, in his childhood, he was expected to read the entire Old Testament once every year, and the New Testament twice.
It was good to meet Stuart Kelly too, who was chairing the session. (He also had an impressive knowledge of the obscurer parts of the Old Testament, incidentally, but I didn’t find out where he grew up.) As Stuart wrote a nice review of Dark Eden in the Guardian, this post in in danger of degenerating into an exercise in mutual admiration, a hazard that Ken noted here. But there it is. I really enjoyed meeting them both, and I really enjoyed Ken’s book.
A great audio version of this story of mine (first published in Interzone in 2008) is now available in #253 of StarShipSofa, the excellent audio magazine edited by Tony C. Smith. It’s read by Simon Hildbrandt. He’s done an excellent job of it.
I did a talk and reading this morning at the Greenbelt festival. It was certainly the largest bunch of people I’ve yet met to talk about the book, and most of them had read it too. There were many interesting questions, a couple of which really made me think about this book (some 20 years in the making, as I realised when I was preparing my talk) and its relationship with my life.
One questioner asked me whether the book had changed me, which I’ve never been asked before. It’s something of a cliché that ‘this book [whatever book it is] will change your life’, but I’ve never thought about whether the writer is also changed. The answer was, yes it has. The book is about letting go of the past, and in the course of writing it, I’ve certainly learned something about that painful process. How much the book shaped that learning, or reflected it, I’m not sure I can say, but I feel sure that, to some degree, it shaped it, for I have always believed that the stories we make up function, like dreams do, as a way of processing and recombining things that can’t be resolved by pure reason.
Another question was about the process of breaking free of our family of origin in order to be ourselves. Of course the book is all about that, and I knew that before, but it had never quite struck me before how much my whole adult life so far (and I am in my fifties) had been about just that: breaking free from, and simultaneously reconciling myself to…
Several people have asked me if Dark Eden is to have sequels. I actually have ideas for two sequels. The first of the two is set several generations on from the events in Dark Eden, in the new, larger, but more violent and more stratified world brought into being by the events in that book.
It’s currently appearing online in the magazine Aethernet, in 12 monthly installments, under the title Gela’s Ring. It will also be published in book form by Corvus in 2014, under the title Mother of Eden. I anticipate that the book version will be quite different in a number of ways from the serialised version.
As to the third book in the series, well, we’ll see.
Doing a reading with a musical accompaniment: I’d recommend it to any writer.
This was at Pulp Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh (a very lively little place with cafe attached), with Southern Tenant Folk Union (a bunch of really talented musicians who play lovely bluegrass-influenced music). I did a couple of readings from Dark Eden. For the second reading, the band cycled round and round the same four bars in the background. It was a bit of an experiment, but really seemed to create tension, allowing long pauses between paragraphs and lines. It was something of a revelation to me, too, having to fit my words around a rhythmic base, and surely the nearest I’ll ever now get to being the frontman of a band.
It’s not all that often done, as far as I’m aware – story-telling to music – or at any rate it’s not a big phenomenon, but the potential is surely huge, when so many people walking around listening to their iPods.
My son Dominic is way ahead of me on this one, by the way, and unlike me, he can do the words and the music. Here is his beautiful The Receipt and Escape.
I was very pleased to learn this week that Dark Eden has been selected as the ‘Big Read’ book for the Green Belt Festival this year. It’s quite an honour.
This support for my book comes from an unexpected quarter. This is a Christian festival. Dark Eden (like The Holy Machine) obviously draws deeply on Judeo-Christian tradition (one reviewer described the main character John Redlantern, as Cain and Moses rolled into one), but it isn’t a Christian book. It will be interesting to see what festival readers make of it.
Reflections in this blog (some more articulate than others) on my relationship with religion, can be found: here (‘Batter my heart’), here (‘The Christmas story’), here (‘From Bodhisattva to St Josaphat: the adventures of a story’), here (‘A Buddhist temple’) and here (‘Science fiction and religion’).
