Blog, books, stories.
The Peacock Cloak was officially launched in Bradford on Friday. This is just a reminder that it will be launched again, along with Ian Whates’ Growing Pains, at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Ave, London, this Saturday (April 6th), at 1 – 2pm, just to make sure both books are properly afloat. Details here.
I’ve posted some reviews of The Peacock Cloak here.
Broadway Books (part of the Crown Publishing Group) has acquired US rights in DARK EDEN and its sequel (MOTHER OF EDEN aka GELA’S RING). I’m very pleased!
Full press release:
PRESS RELEASE – MAJOR US DEAL FOR CHRIS BECKETT
Julian Pavia at Broadway Books (part of the Crown Publishing Group) has acquired US rights in the science fiction novels DARK EDEN and GELA’S RING by Chris Beckett from Michael Carlisle at Inkwell Management and Vanessa Kerr, Rights Director at Grove Atlantic in London, for a high five-figure sum in US dollars.
DARK EDEN was published by Atlantic’s Corvus imprint in 2012 and is shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best SF Novel of the year, as well as being mentioned in several national papers as 2012’s best SF novel. The sequel, GELA’S RING, will be published by Corvus in spring 2014. The agent who did both world rights deals with Atlantic was John Jarrold.
‘Ravi Mirchandani is in New York and both he and Michael Carlisle have obviously worked their magic in regards to this offer,’ said John Jarrold. ‘Chris and I are delighted. He is a major author, whose talent is now being recognised both inside and outside the UK.’
Contact John Jarrold for further details.
The first review of The Peacock Cloak is in today’s Financial Times.
It’s nice to be compared to Ray Bradbury, though I’ve never read The Martian Chronicles (or ‘The Pedestrian’ either as far as I can recall). But these things become part of the aether after a while. Bits and pieces of them find their way to us via the imaginations of many people, and we reassemble the fragments.
You can order the book now, in paperback or kindle, from Amazon (right now Amazon haven’t linked the two versions up, but they’re both there somewhere if you look.)
If you’ve read the book, and would like a little more background to the stories, I put a little link for each story here, with sundry thoughts and comments. It’s like the patter between songs at a concert, I suppose.
Anyone looking through this blog would see that there are a lot of items about climate change. I’ve become very interested in this topic, and I’m going to write a novel about it (Slaymaker), which should come out in 2015.
What fascinates me in particular is the psychology of it. Have you noticed that, even if you have taken on board that this is a real threat, it’s extremely difficult to hold that fact in your mind? Or that to mention it too often feels like bad manners? ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ I feel like saying even as I write this, ‘I don’t mean to be a bore, but would you mind if I mentioned just once again that we’re plunging headlong towards a precipice?’
Somehow a whole battery of psychological defences come into play (the very defences, perhaps, that allow us to distance ourselves from the fact of our mortality) and these defences cause us to constantly sideline climate change as if it just were a detail, or some sort of minor irritant, rather than an existential threat to our civilization. On Monday, for instance, on the Today Programme on Radio 4, there was a discussion about the unprecendently weird weather in the UK in 2012 (not just in the UK either but in many other places including Australia) and the fact that we should expect this to continue. Later in the same programme there was an interview with Conservative MP Tim Yeo about nuclear power, shale gas and energy policy in general: yet no connection at all was made between the two items, and climate change wasn’t even mentioned as a factor to consider when weighing up the options.
On Wednesday, there was an item about biofuels on the same programme, in which an eminent scientist (Sir David King), questioned whether they really helped reduce carbon emissions, even though they could be used to meet our commitment to produce energy from renewable sources. John Hayes, the Energy Minister, told him that his concerns were ‘bourgeois’ and that he himself was a practical man whose main concern was to ‘keep the lights on’. The clear implication was that being concerned about climate change was a bit wet and middle class, and while he was prepared to toss a few sops towards the climate lobby, he wouldn’t offer more than that.
Well, of course many interest groups can be tamed with the judicious use of symbolic placation. But the physical world isn’t a lobby or an interest group, and it has no interest in symbolic gestures. We either do something about climate change or we don’t. It’s all the same to nature either way. The trouble is that it won’t be all the same to us.
The galaxy is vast, the number of planets enormous, so how come we never hear from any alien life forms?
Professor Galacticus proposes the following explanation:
There is a lot of life in the galaxy, and he surmises that all of it will be carbon-based and all of it originate in water. As a result, in every planet in which life takes root, deposits of carbon and hydrocarbons will build up over millions of years as organisms die, form sediments, and are subjected to various geological forces.
In a relatively small proportion of living planets, Galacticus suggests, the process of biological evolution will have resulted in symbol- and tool-using intelligence. This in turn brings into being a newer and much faster secondary evolutionary process, corresponding, roughly speaking, to what we call culture.
At a certain level of development, culture stumbles upon the vast reserves of chemical energy that built up millions of years before it came into being. By exploiting these reserves, culture is able to massively accelerate its own evolution – Galacticus speaks of ‘putting on seven-league boots’ – because the enormous increase in the productivity of each individual allows large numbers of individual to cease to be involved in meeting the basic physical needs of the species and thereby become available for other work.
In such a context, highly complex activities such as space travel become possible: activities which require individuals to devote themselves to doing things with no immediate practical benefit at all. And when cultures embark on the project of space travel, they naturally begin to contemplate the possibility that other cultures, on other planets, are doing likewise, and begin to develop means of searching for, and communicating with, those putative others.
However all this occurs in a very narrow window for, unknown at first to the individuals who make up these cultures, they have set in train a force that will destroy them. This force is not nuclear weapons, as some have surmised it might be, nor poisonous pollution, but something seemingly entirely innocuous: a very common substance, and one that is not merely non-toxic but actually essential to life. Carbon dioxide.
By the time the danger becomes evident, cultures are already so massively committed to fossil fuels that change is difficult. It is not technically impossible – the explosive development of technological knowledge which the ‘seven-league boots’ have made possible means that a switch to some combination of alternative energy sources is entirely feasible in purely engineering terms – but it is psychologically and sociologically very difficult indeed. Almost every one of the intelligent life forms in the galaxy has gone well past the point of no-return – or will do so – before they have fully taken on board the nature of the threat.
And then the physical world takes over, positive feedback loops of various kinds kick in, and, very rapidly, the culture, what is left of it, is reduced to a precarious existence in which the very idea of attempting to communicate with aliens, just for the sheer fun of it, is simply laughable.
‘Hence,’ says Professor Galacticus, ‘the silence from the sky.’
* * *
‘You may think,’ he adds, ‘that I am making far too many assumptions about the psychology and sociology of unknown life forms, but I don’t think I am. You see, their basic psychological equipment is always going to be the product of a biological evolutionary process. We know how creative such a process is, and we know the diversity it has achieved, but it has one deep limitation. It is reactive rather than teleological. It is not aimed at anything, but is simply based on the accumulation of a kind of trial and error knowledge, and this makes it very weak at dealing with an unpredented threat.
‘I would, however, be very pleased to be proved wrong.’
Aethernet is a new on-line magazine specifically devoted to serial fiction, developed by Tony and Barbara Ballantyne The first issue will be available for sale on March 30th, subsequent issues going on sale on the first of the month from May 1st onwards.
Aethernet is where Gela’s Ring (the sequel to Dark Eden) will first appear, in 12 monthly installments, from Easter 2013 to Easter 2014.
Also in the first issue: The Ties that Bind by Juliet E McKenna, Murder of the Heart by Philip Palmer, Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky and The Smallest of Things by Ian Whates.
You will be able to buy the issue direct from the website, or via Amazon.
Newcon Press (and me) will be launching The Peacock Cloak at Eastercon at Bradford.
Just to make sure it is well and truly launched, we’ll also be launching it at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Ave, London, on April 6th, 1-2, along with Ian Whates’ new collection, Growing Pains.*
This article describes a huge, concerted hundred-million dollar effort by wealthy American conservatives to discredit the evidence that climate change results from human activity.
But why? Doesn’t being conservative mean wanting to keep things the way they are? And wouldn’t it logically follow that conservatives would want to protect their country, its cities, its farmlands, its way of life, from the depradations of hurricanes, floods, droughts and worldwide turmoil? Self-interest might seem to explain it, but I don’t think it really does.
Revealingly, the picture at the beginning of the article shows an American conservative holding up a sign: ‘I don’t believe the liberal media.’
That’s it really, isn’t it? There’s been a category error, and this has come to be seen as a partisan political issue, when it is really a straightforward threat from the material world.
It’s as if a driverless truck was hurtling down a hill towards the town square, and someone shouted out a warning to a bunch of people who were standing there talking. But no one agreed with his political views so they all thought it best to ignore him.
‘Don’t come whining to us about runaway trucks, you liberal pinko!’
I went up to Edge Hill University this week to give a talk to creative writing students there. I’ve never been on a creative writing course personally, but I see myself as a sort of honorary graduate of Edge Hill, because winning the Edge Hill Short Fiction Prize has proved a turning point in my writing career. It was good to see Ailsa Cox again, a great short story writer herself, who’s done a huge amount of work over the years keeping the Edge Hill prize on the road, and also Carys Bray, whose excellent collection I wrote about here. Good to meet the students too.
I’d been asked to talk about my career as a writer, and what I could glean from it in terms of advice for would-be writers. What I think I have learnt boils down to this:
(1) You do actually have to write stuff, and you need to be prepared to write a lot of embarrassing rubbish before you find your own style, voice and subject-matter. This entails taking a huge gamble, because there’s no guarantee that you will ever find these things, or that they are even there to be found. (There were times when I wondered whether my ambition to write was simply deluded, a cancer in my life, draining energy from other goals.)
(2) Some of us are drawn to writing in part because it allows us to hide away in our rooms and not deal with the messy and worrying world of OTHER PEOPLE. But it is a big mistake to look at it this way. Writing is a job in which, as with most jobs, you need a network of colleagues and contacts to get on.
This last point has really only dawned on me in fairly recent years. A turning point for me was accepting an invitation Roy Gray, of Interzone, to participate in an event at the Eastercon SF convention, only about 8 or 9 years ago. He introduced me to some other writers, and in due course, at subsequent Eastercons, I met more. One of them was Neil Williamson. Neil introduced me to Andrew Hook, who at that time ran Elastic Press, and Andrew was to publish The Turing Test and enter it for the Edge Hill Prize. When I won the prize, this enabled my agent John Jarrold (who I’d met in a similar way) to interest Corvus in publishing my novels The Holy Machine and Dark Eden.
There’s a lot of luck here of course, a lot of contingency – another set of judges might well have chosen another book – but you have to create opportunities for luck to happen. (You can’t be sure of winning a lottery if you buy a ticket, but you can be sure you won’t win if you don’t buy one.) Without those kinds of chains of contacts, I might well not have got much further than publishing the occasional story in magazines. It’s not just that I wouldn’t have got books published: I might not have written them.
One of the students has since blogged about my talk here. He says that I gave the same advice as everyone else does. I find this quite reassuring for some reason.
I enjoyed myself: I like having to think about the business of writing. And I loved the train journey there and back. Peace, warmth, comfort, a plug for my laptop, the world passing by outside.
And no OTHER PEOPLE at all.
I wrote here previously about my distaste for a new Oxfam ad, which seemed to me to perpetuate the nauseating stereotype of Africa as a pathetic and helpless victim dependent for its salvation on the outside world. (I wonder how much investment has been lost to Africa as a result of this stereotype, perpetuated, ironically, by aid agencies trying to use pity to get money from us to help Africa?)
My daughter Nancy recently spent a year in Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest countries, and my wife and I spent two weeks there with her. As we drove across the country, the delivery end of the aid business was everywhere in evidence. One after another along the wayside were clinics, schools and orphanages funded by European and American aid agencies. The Malawian government itself has something like half of its budget provided by foreign aid.
Malawi is a delightful country – its people are friendly, interested, and courteous in a charming old-fashioned kind of way, and certainly not pathetic or helpless – but I felt uncomfortable about what I was seeing. Where was all this going? Is it useful, healthy, or even sustainable in the long run, for a country to have its basic services largely provided by external donors, and often administered by them as well? Was this really ever going to help the country reach a point where it could fund its own institutions? Where were the industries, where were even the beginnings of the industries, that would make this possible?
So I found myself asking the question: does aid really help?
Certainly the evidence thus far is not encouraging. As the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, observed: “In the last 50 years, you’ve [the rest of the world] spent US$400 billion in aid to Africa. But what is there to show for it?” Dambisa Moyo – she is a Zambian economist – observes that just 30 years ago Malawi (among other countries) had a per capita income that was higher than that of China. Why has one country shot ahead, and the other remained stuck in a state of dependency?
Well of course there are a number of possible reasons for this, and I couldn’t help feeling that Moyo skated rather lightly over some of them. (China, after all, has been a state and an urban civilization for thousands of years, long before any country in Europe, while Malawi, like most African countries, is a recent invention, and its modest cities have only existed for a century or so). However I remained struck by Moyo’s thesis, which is that, far from being a solution to Africa’s problem with development, aid is in very large part its cause.
Aid supports rent-seeking – that is, the use of governmental authority to take and make money without trade or production of wealth. At a very basic level, an example of this is where a government official with access to aid money set aside for public welfare takes the money for his own personal use. Obviously there cannot be rent-seeking without rent.
It isn’t just a matter of outright corruption, though. In all kinds of ways, Moyo argues, aid creates a system where the best way for ambitious people to get on is to gain access to the money tap, rather than to create wealth themselves. A mineral resource such as oil can have a similar effect, resulting in a country’s elite simply living on the income derived from the sale of that resource, rather than building up an economy that would deliver wealth when the oil has gone.
Indeed, aid may not only discourage local economic activity, it may even actively undermine it:
There’s a mosquito net manufacturer in Africa. He manufactures around 500 nets a week. He employs ten people who (as with many African countries) each have to support upwards of fifteen relatives…
Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who… goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets… at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive, the nets are distributed and a ‘good’ deed is done.
With the market flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is promptly put out of business. His ten workers can no longer support their 150 dependents (who are now forced to depend on handouts) and one mustn’t forget that in a maximum of five years the majority of the imported nets will be torn, damaged and of no further use….
The gift of nets, in other words, creates a need for more gifts, and so on and on. It’s not hard to see how such a pattern, repeated in many different ways and at many different levels, could indeed result in a permanent dependency on external aid.
Moyo advocates a gradual phasing out of aid as we now understand it, and discusses a range of different ways in which Africa could begin to finance its own development. Her suggestions include trade, a sore point for Africa since most donor countries take away with the left hand what the right hand has given by denying Africa fair access to their markets, but Moyo points out that there are other new trading partners in the rest of the developing world (notably China and India), and opportunities for trade within Africa itself, or indeed within single countries. They also include foreign direct investment in capital projects (such as China is now enthusiastically engaged in), borrowing money in capital markets, use of micro-finance (a means of providing small loans for local businesses which has been very effective in other parts of the world), and making better and more effective use of Africa’s own savings. (Apparently there are huge quantities of savings in developing countries, but in the absence of access to an appropriate banking system, they are often simply held in cash, or in the form of other assets like gold, with the result that they are not available to the economy: ‘borrowers cannot borrow, and lenders do not lend’). To those who might object that African countries would find it difficult in raising money in these kinds of ways, Moyo’s response is that dependence on aid is one of the things that make it difficult.
I’m no economist, and I’m not familiar with the literature on aid and development (as I am sure would be evident to any development expert reading this post), but I found her arguments compelling. I suspect many people of a leftish persuasion would be inclined to dismiss her essentially market- and business-orientated solutions out of hand, but I don’t feel so inclined myself. Another thing that struck me about Malawi (based on my own observations and those of my daughter) was the very visible presence of European and American development professionals, travelling back and forth across the country in their SUVs, doing deals, attending meetings, enjoying a bit of R & R with their families in lakeside resorts. I’m not saying these weren’t good people doing their best, but I would much rather have seen business people looking for opportunities for investment and trade.
