A quickie with Richard Morgan

Wotcha. I really should be manfully struggling with the end of Champion of Mars (nearly finished!) but I took a quick break to put this interview with Richard Morgan on the site. Why? He’s a great interviewee, and I just finished reviewing The Cold Commands for SFX so I figured I’d bung it up. Timely, ain’t it? Although the interview is three years old, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, not least both of us squirming ridiculously about the slight danger someone might think we are gay just because we are talking about same-sex relationships. I apologise to my gay friends, but we straight boys just can’t help it. At least books like The Cold Commands will help us get over what is, at the end of the day, hypocritical prudery. 

My review of Morgan’s latest will be in SFX 215, so it’ll be a couple of months before I can post it here, but you can read my review of book one of A Land Fit for Heroes, The Steel Remains, right here, right now.

And now, back to Mars…

Another rant from the archive

This piece is from Death Ray 14. Only a few of these left now, these old Deep Thoughts, I shall have to write something new soon, perish the thought.

Magic science really does wind me up. Except in Doctor Who, I can forgive the Doctor. There are innumerable examples of it – I don’t mention The Core, The Day After Tomorrow or 2012 below, for example. And although I freely own sometimes it is necessary to make a plot point (or create a parable, as below), a lot of the time it is lazy and, dare I say it, extremely rubbish. Bad science enshittens SF as much as bad writing. That’s right, enshittens.

The Magic of… Science!

Genes that can turn the evolutionary clock back! Radiation that gives you superpowers rather than cancer! Chemical rockets that can fly to a distant star system before everyone dies of old age! SF is rammed full of such magic science, and by golly, it gets on my goat.

Science fiction does precisely what the name says, it is fiction, with some science (though if we’re talking about the likes of Greg Egan, it is science, with some fiction). Except when it doesn’t.

The fiction part means we should expect reality to be bent, or broken, especially if the author wants to explore an intriguing concept or put forward a metaphor exploring one aspect of the human condition or another. This humanist side of SF is essentially fantasy, concerned almost solely with the soul, so it’s excusable. I doubt Stan Lee really believed that Peter Parker would turn into Spider-man when bitten by a radioactive spider, or that Richard Matheson thought a man could actually shrink, but these stories are not about those concepts, the concepts are only plot devices to help the authors get to what they really wanted to talk about: dealing with power, and dealing with losing it. Such things are the giants and the magic swords of modern-day parablists, and we can forgive them that.

But SF is not just the inheritor of yesteryear’s fantasticalities, it is more than Jonathan Swift with rocket boots. Some ‘scientist’ SF deliberately sets itself up a soothsayer for modern times. And this is good. Sure, people like Arthur C Clarke got it wrong a lot (a prime example would be his lunar dust seas in A Fall of Moondust) but at least such things are genuine ‘What ifs?’; solid speculation built on the theories of the time, and, do you know, they are occasionally right.

‘Magic Science’ then, is where the story insists it is doing the latter, does not have the insight of the former, and ends up peddling technobabble nonsense in place of both. Magic SF is not as clever as the scientist variety, or as wise as the humanist. Its tricks are neither the fantastical or the logical, but manufactured from ideas spun off the real or almost real, often giving us something that we know already to be rubbish. Mostly to provide some kind of backdrop to ongoing, inter-character wranglings. SF soap, with spangly lights of fake science.

TV SF is the biggest criminal here. Take Star Trek for example, if only because, until the late series at least, one week we’d get a solid, full on SF concept, like the Borg, the next, giant flying viruses (ST: Voyager ‘Macrocosm’, season 3). Now, forgive me, but aren’t viruses weeny, simple little things, and, um don’t possess things like stingers and mouths?

The very small components of biology were the source of much sinning until fairly recently. Take another Star Trek episode, ‘Genesis’ (season 7 TNG), where another virus (made of T-cells, big stuff at the time, and the inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise’s T Virus) interacts with ‘introns’ in people’s DNA to devolve them into creatures from their evolutionary past. Interesting. Hang on though, Lieutenant Barclay turns into a spider. I don’t recall the arachnid part of the human lineage, but never mind, because after a few doses of space medicine, everyone is just fine, with no after effects whatsover. This rapid there-and-back-again of total body transmogrification is a firm favourite of 90s SF, and it is, patently, nonsense.

All SF is a product of its time, and serves as an interesting historical footnote to the holders of hindsight. By which we mean, if a certain field is hot news, then it’ll crop up time and again in SF. It’s a trend thing.

Rapid advancements in biology brought genes to the fore, replacing a fear of the power of the atom, which in turn replaced a belief in it. So prevalent was the magic atom in the 50s and 60s that Matheson turned the ambiguous fog that starts the shrinking process in The Shrinking Man radioactive for its ‘Incredible’ film outing. Time marches on, and magic genes have begun to be replaced by magic quantum physics. I’d say nanotech, like that in the new Bionic Woman is also a contender, but though claims made for this are pretty crazy, their capabilities belong to some unpredictable Vingean futurity, so I’m going to let it off the hook.

Quantum shit, however, man that’s some spooky juju. Perhaps through quantum physics we will create Arthur C Clarke’s advanced, seemingly sorcerous technology. But then, confident assertions about the nature of the world to come are usually wrong. Ford made a mock-up nuclear car, after all (its proposed reactor sat waaaay behind the passenger compartment), and I don’t see those in the Tesco car park.

Once more, we have only fallen upon the quantum as it is newish and exciting, and, um very difficult to define.

SF reflects our fears and concerns in a mirror of current science, and in this case, it is the impact of each and every one of us on the world. Quantum physics says observe the world and affect it, our fear says our presence is harmful to the planet. Like Them!‘s radioactive ants standing in for fear of a nuclear apocalypse, blend quantum with green and societal fears and Donnie Darko, Butterfly Effect, The Fountain, The Prestige and even Back to the Future, are revealed as a kind of electric environmentalism, with misplaced humans rerouting their social ecology, sometimes consciously removing their worthless selves from existence.

This is scary science, science that can unravel the fabric of the universe. Though employed intelligently in the above films, quantum SF has the capability to be used in an even more magical way than the most outrageous DNA jiggery pokery. The sciences with the loosest parameters are the easiest to magic up, aren’t they?

Expect it on a small screen near you… now actually: Charlie Jade, Journeyman, Flash Gordon feature this in one cast or another.  All cancelled, interestingly. Perhaps high-end physics just isn’t sexy. (Yeah yeah, Quantum Leap, Sliders, Land of the Giants… They’ve all the alternate reality/ time-hopping thing before, but that doesn’t invalidate my comment that right now it is trendy).

Yes, all SF is speculation, some of it knowingly wrong, and it is entirely partisan of me to imply that magic science is only bad when used as a tool in bad fiction. But this is my patch, my rules. The futuremen will laugh up the sleeves of their togas whatever we dream anyway, saying it never happened like that, just as we smirk at the Victorian proponents of steam-powered velocipedes.

Then again, I’ve never said SF was actually about the future, have I?

The lament of the lonely father

I wrote the piece below about six months before my son Benny was born. It’s mostly about Star Wars, but also life.

Benny is three now, and today is his very first day at nursery (I just left him in the arms of a teacher, me with a lump in my throat) so I thought I’d put this up.

It’s doubly pertinent, as the very recent release of the Star Wars saga on BluRay has the SW fanbase enraged all over again (see? I’m being topical!). Why? Yet more tinkering, that’s why. Personally, I’d rather Lucas just left the things alone and made something new, but they’re his films. I find the geek rallying cry/ self-indulgent, spoilt-brat whine of ‘George Lucas raped my childhood’ to be utterly odious on several levels, its lazy, knee-jerk use of such an emotive term top of the list. And why hate the guy for providing you with years of entertainment? If he wants to overpaint his own work obsessively like some latterday Richard Dadd, let him. (At least he didn’t knife his father). Surely the impact of Star Wars on you as a child is more important than what it looks like now. I mean, I loved Krull, but I wouldn’t peg it as essential viewing, and I certainly wouldn’t call Peter Yates a retroactive pederast if he’d decided to add a CGI glaive to the proceedings (too late, he’s dead now).  Or aren’t we moving on? We’re not, are we?

Perhaps this is yet another indication of our culture’s intense juvenilisation effect, a step on the evolutionary road to idiot-Eloihood, and a time when our giggling, endlessly masturbating, Hello Kitty-dependent descendants will be feasted upon by giant intelligent rats who keep them high on food made entirely of corn syrup and the essence of superhero movie remakes.

Or maybe I’m being harsh, because I’m just a little sad that my little boy is growing up so fast.

Firstborn

No, not the story of Gor the Gorilla-boy, but the impending arrival of Guy’s new kid. A few days ago, crucial question of fatherhood reared its ugly head to vex our already troubled cheeky tyke…

The recent news that my wife is expecting our first child heralded a whole new wave of worries in the Haleyhold. Not only do you find yourself fretting over a lot of unpleasant potential pregnancy problems and imminent financial meltdown, but you find your mind racing ahead, past the gestation, vaulting over the birth and scampering far into the future, like some kind of terrified chrono-hare. What if baby inherits the coarser looks of dad, rather than the finer features of mother? Is it going to be stupid? The fretting ranges on  – Which university should I start looking at? What job will young Haley do? Then it gets silly. It’s a conscious effort to wrench your mind back to the present, and that’s weird enough as it is. It’s almost like science fiction. Like, there’s a tiny person growing inside my wife! Help! I feel like Kevin McCarthy at the climax of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, shouting an unbelievable truth at an indifferent world.

At least I don’t need to dwell too much on how the newborn is going to get out, unlike my wife.

A few days ago, a far more pertinent problem popped into my head: What SF am I going to show it first? This really is crucial. (Don’t think for a moment that, boy or girl, it’s not going to get an SF upbringing. There’s an awesome two foot high rocket, complete with moon rover and chewable space people, in the Early Learning Centre that has got my name, erm, I mean my child’s name, whatever that is going to be, on it). Like most kids, my very first exposure to the fantastical was through stories read to me by my parents, space toys and TV. As a preschool kid there was Thunderbirds, Space 1999, Star Trek, Bagpuss, The Clangers, Doctor Who, Chorlton and the Wheelies, Jamie and the Magic Torch, classic black and white RKO serials – a galaxy of SF and fantasy gems, opening the already wide eyes of 1970s tots to the pleasures and disappointments of the fundamentally unreal. But now, what awaits my offspring? A lot of badly drawn, shouty anime, by the looks of it, cut into meaningless, garish scraps by even shoutier adverts. And that purple frigging dinosaur.

If that were not a troublesome enough worry, I have had also to ask myself: which  Star Wars first? Tricky. Now it’s obvious Haley 1.1 will have to see these films, at least twelve times. It’s the law. But in what order? According to the narrative’s internal chronology, or classic trilogy first? Is it fair to make someone who doesn’t know who Darth Vader is miss out on learning the shocking truth of Luke Skywalker’s true parentage? Actually, is it fair to make someone new to the world sit through an animated tax dispute with some disinterested actors standing around in the foreground? Hmm. I think I have just made my mind up.

With kids too, there’s always the issue of the bizarre things that scare them. My brother Garth and I, for example, both loved the Muppets, but Sweetums and the other monsters freaked us out so much we used to hallucinate that they were standing outside our bedroom window. Screaming followed. You can’t legislate for these things, but Mrs. Haley’s collection of disturbing Scandinavian fairy tales is going on the top shelf, just in case.

Crumbs, I just thought, what if the kid likes Jar Jar? I think I’ll go back to worrying about the cost of childcare. It’s less upsetting.

Back to 2011.

FYI, Benny was born on July 12th, 2008, and I have been tired since July 12th, 2008. He was two weeks late due to some low level of incompetence on the part of the local maternity services (i.e. they forgot about us). His birth was terrifying. After an attempt at induction he was delivered by caesarean section. He’s a lovely lad, very cheeky, and clever. I laugh now at my brother for the impending arrival of his own offspring; real, wineglass-in-hand schadenfreude guffawing, because he has NO IDEA how much his life will change.

Fortunately, it is worth it. Which I tell him after I stop giggling.

As for watching space stuff,  we’ve tried both the original Star Wars (“Daddy! Want to watch spaceships!”) and the Phantom Menace. Star Wars holds his attention until we meet Kenobi. The Phantom Menace loses its lustre as soon as the younger Kenobi and his boss sit down for tea. Exploratory watches, but it says it all really. We also tried The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but it was  a bit too scary.

And yes, childcare has nearly bankrupted me. But we did get that rocket. And it is cool.

Plenty more stuff to see

“SF is a genre more afflicted by doomsayers than most, with poor old Gaia getting a rough rogering from the human race on a regular basis. But, Guy Haley asks, is it finally time for the Apocalypse now?” As I wrote in 2007 in the piece below, another from Death Ray‘s ‘Deep Thought’ column section. This one is from issue 9. (Man, did we write a lot back then or what!) I wrote this after reading Evolution by Stephen Baxter. It is a great book, but kind of depressing. This column was almost therapy for it.

By the way, it’s always been my intention to use this blog as an archive for my work, but I’ve been a bit remiss of late in getting it online, so I am trying to get a few pieces up every day rather than playing computer games. There are a ton of new book, film and TV reviews. Just go look. Eventually, once I’ve worked through my backlog, there’ll be some more current pieces here. Won’t that be nice?

I immodestly figure that some of these articles make pretty good blog posts, like this one, so I’m putting them here as well as into the article archive section up top there. It saves me from having to write new posts. I am a scoundrel! Ha!

To be blunt, the more articles there are here, the more likely people are to visit, and there’s a chance they’ll buy my books. Then, just maybe, I’ll be able to afford an office rather than just working at the top of the frickin’ stairs…

Back to the writing then. I am galloping through Champion of Mars. Yesterday, I was at a dinner party at a science base on Ascraeus Mons. Today, I’ll be going to a gene blending unit a thousand years hence. No bad, I suppose, for a bloke who never actually leaves his landing.

The Ends of the World

Famine, Plague, War and Death get regular trots round the SF paddock. Numerous authors, from Mary Shelley onwards, have had a crack at the collapse of civilisation, the end of the human race or even the total destruction of the Earth itself. None of it’s happened of course, but given the young age of SF and the long, long life of the Earth, one or all of these scenarios are likely to come to pass eventually. We could survive, or our more depressive writers may prove to be right. But how right, and how soon?

End of the world doomsaying – millenarianism – is a given aspect of the human psyche. It’s a consequence of our evolution. On the one hand, it’s our monkey-like fear of death writ large and shared with our fellows. On the other, our causally-primed brain is a handy asset for surviving and making tools, but it does mean that we have to have a reason for everything. When something is beyond our immediate understanding, this has led to some mighty peculiar logical leaps. In the absence of science, terrible occurrences are explained as divine acts (most often punishment, because guilt plays a large part in doom-mongering). We feel bad for being, so disasters are all our fault, a punishment for our sins. God could be back to finish the job any time, so be good.

Basically, people have been fretting about the end of the world since the beginning of time, we literally can’t help it.

And though we now take a different view of the way the world works, the faulty reasoning of “Bad things have happened because we are bad, therefore bad things will happen again, and they will be worse,” is as true in Soylent Green as in The Book of Revelations. Only God has been removed from the equation. Now it’s our own petards that will hoist us.

The environment’s our current bete noir, it has been for forty years, with a brief break for nuclear terror. Global warming? Soylent Green, The Drowned World, The Space Merchants… all feature this most modern of worries. Other well-worn paths to doom include volcanic activity, global cooling, environmental collapse, war, plague, death of food crops, moral degeneracy, and of course, alien invasion.

Barring the alien invasion, all of these events are feasible. Looking at it, there are so many ways for mankind to be snuffed out it’s amazing we’re still here.

But we are, and we aren’t going anywhere. It’s easy to regard these entertainments are prescient. The disasters may be plausible, but their consequences are not. They aren’t warnings, they’re worries.

Cast your mind back at the 1980s. SF books and films predicted the nuclear destruction of the Earth as if it were an inevitability. The chilling drama Threads (Sheffield flattened by an atomic bomb, mutant babies, the horror) was regarded as a palpable truth. But this madness did not happen precisely because both sides in the Cold War knew that nuclear war would be madness, they even called the doctrine behind the arms race MAD (mutually assured destruction – a doctrine of immediate retaliation predicated on everyone dying if one side attacked).

Peer behind your own fears and you’ll see that there’s an assumption of the worst in all millennial thinking, your own included. The planet, we’re told, is overdue a supervolcanic eruption, and that would be very bad. But that assumes that there will be one soon, that we won’t do anything about it, and that our civilisation will be so battered by the event that it will inevitably collapse. That’s a lot of assumptions. The same for a modern plague, or for an asteroid strike or anything else. The case has been made that we’ve become overspecialised as individuals (come the end, how many of you would know how to catch, skin and cook a rabbit?) and that weakens us. But complex societies have undergone cataclysmic events many times before and survived.

Mayan temple cities wreathed in jungle are the poster images for apocalypses. True, the Mayans suffered several severe setbacks, but were they wiped out? No. The Mayans were in fact the last Amerindian civilisation to be vanquished  by European invaders, their final city falling in 1697. As a people, they’re still there today. The Roman Empire may have collapsed as a political entity, but civilisation did not cease to be. And the Black Death, which killed up to two thirds of the population in Europe, far from seeing the end of the world, actually helped kickstart the Renaissance by redistributing wealth.

Those fearful of the future may counter that our society is too complex, but surely a complex society is more able to develop complex solutions? Our culture, which is as alive we are, cushions us from fate. In a flood an animal will drown. We’ll make boats. If we don’t know how, we’ll be able to ask someone who does, or read how to. Culture is such a crucial aspect of our being that Stephen Baxter, in his book Evolution, had to fudge its removal in order to have mankind once more subject to the raw power of natural shaping. Culture insulates us, to a degree, from such forces. And, if the worst came to the worst, and no cultural transmission survived, we’d still be able to figure out how to build a boat from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong. Things could get worse. Much worse. People could starve, die of superflu, choke on pollution and a myriad other things. But there are six billion of us now. To destroy all modern learning and cast us back into a dark age would be difficult, to kill us all would require a catastrophe of stupendous proportions. We might well be facing our biggest challenge yet with our rapacious need to all have bigger fridges and cars and sod the whales, but do you seriously think that, collectively, we’ll let it get so bad we’ll die out? We point to our governments as being useless, and we are thus doomed, but that makes the assumption we’re stuck with them, or powerless. Modes of governance do change, and people act without them. Hell, rising fuel costs alone will make you change your life. You probably already have.

Perhaps there is an alternative path we will tread. Nothing in nature occurs in isolation. Why should life? But we see none nearby. Perhaps our fate is not to ultimately extinguish life here, but to actively spread it elsewhere. Perhaps that is why intelligence evolves in the first place. All life is is a complicated way of allowing some quirky chemistry to continue replicating itself. To conquer the sea, life grew fins; the land, legs and lungs; the air, wings. Nearly every part of this world heaves with life, but to get life more developed than a tardigrade (these tiny ‘water bears’ are so hardy they could survive a trip through space) off-world requires something more sophisticated than the asteroid bagatelle proposed by some panspermia theorists. Maybe humanity is not a cancer. Maybe we’re the gonads of the Earth… One day, perhaps, an alien Von Däniken will be writing books about us.

If on the other hand Christopher, Wyndham, Wells, Baxter, Matheson et al are right, within centuries it’ll be like we never were, and in 30 million years new species will have evolved to replace the ones we hurried off to an early grave. We’re surfing a wave of life, and if we fall off, well, it’ll be the job of the squids to take Earth’s seed to the stars. They’ve got 3 billion years to do it in after all, until the sun swallows the world, and that is unavoidable.

The Alien Among us

“Slap a latex forehead on our emotional inadequacies and you can say what you like to them, argues Guy Haley.” So read the strap line in Death Ray 18, published in 2009. I’m not sure what I write below holds true right now, SF has undergone quite a change in the last few years, and the spaceborne shows this referred to have died out. They’ve been replaced by drama that is less clear-cut in its view on Human (American) cultural superiority. Those Americans, they’re getting all complicated.

Since Star Trek gave us Mr. Spock, you haven’t been able to put together a crew of space-faring explorers without including at least one alien. And why not? Mr Spock. He was a fine character in a cast of fine characters. This half-ET, coldly dispassionate scientist was a foil for Kirk’s loin-driven hotheadedness and Bones’ world-weary, and equally emotional, cynicism. Spock was often right, but also struggling with his human side. Culturally, he represented the calm of scientific progress set at right-angles with the messiness of humanity. It’s part of science fiction’s infatuation with progress, as old as the genre itself. Spock’s character eventually hit a gravelly-voiced balance between logic and emotion, and that was a kind of adult thing to do. But times changed, and aliens don’t quite represent what they once did.

Spock was a humanisation of the kind of brainiacs depicted elsewhere in the fifties and sixties, the bigheads from This Island Earth, the omnipotent Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dr Morbius of The Forbidden Planet. These were themselves different sides of the same coin – they are depictions of rationalists, and represent the fears of and hopes for science. Spock is by extension the humanisation of the scientist, a previously distant, powerful and sometimes terrifying figure.

Aliens became somewhat de rigueur in starship crews after Spock, especially in a certain kind of show – the Trek franchise, Roddenberry’s grave-robbed offerings and their clones (that’s what we’re really talking about here, the almost military space ensemble, they can be everything from last Thursday to Jesus elsewhere), and these reached their peak in the 1990s. But whereas Spock was an equal, and in many ways superior, to his crew mates, the aliens who came afterwards lack the same balance. They fulfill a different function. Aliens in ensemble casts increasingly came to signify certain human personality types, while the humans themselves become more and more  bland. There’s not much between Sinclair, Picard, or Sisko. They’re serious men doing a serious job, moments of ludicrously shoehorned levity aside. Their subordinates are worse. Is there really a massive difference between Riker, Chakotay and Garibaldi? With exceptions, these characters are almost unreal in their insipidness. They have nothing but the most artificial flaws or needs, and each has their own little pouch of trite wisdom. The roaring James Tiberius Kirk they are not. Instead we have to look to the aliens for any real representation of human traits. Aliens in the 80s and 90s allowed us to have contrite monsters like Andromeda‘s Rev Bem, emotional types like Troi, even buffoons like Neelix at a time when, suddenly, it seemed unacceptable for future people to be shown as anything but really, really nice.

By far the largest sub-grouping of alien hanger-on is that of the domesticated warrior. Worf, Star Trek‘s house-broken Klingon, has a lot to answer for on this score. Stargate and Andromeda have them in abundance in the sort-of-humans Teal’c, Ronon Dex, Tyr Anazazi and Telemachus Rhade. There’s even Bigfoot in Sanctuary. These creatures are handy in a fight, they are noble, they are loyal. Like Spock they struggle, but with rage. They are all also invariably patronised about their efforts to be more human. They are descendants of the noble savage encountered in much 19th century literature. All these aliens are emblematic of that great sense of rectitude once held by Western societies. They are a cultural residue, Victorian relics of racism. You can’t (thankfully) have a character say ‘Well done, Mr South Sea Islander, you have learnt that shoes are good!’ as was often the case in bygone adventure tales, but no-one gives a stuff if you do similar with a Talaxian. SF is retrograde in this respect, it recklessly rams the anodyne values of political correctness down speckled throats in a most un-PC way. The foibles of the aliens allow the humans to be flawless, to wear little half-smiles on their faces as they watch the aliens’ funny little ways or lecture them, bizarrely, on their inhumanity.

Humans in this kind of SF never complain, take the piss or get depressed. They don’t hold difficult beliefs or do anything vaguely shocking. They are really boring.  In these shows, humans are our parents, and we are the aliens. So Worf or B’Elanna can get really mad and break things because they aren’t human, Neelix is a cock because he’s not a man, Londo can be sly because he isn’t one of us. Ronon can kill because he is not from Earth. Mankind in this kind of SF is irreproachable, and that’s just bollocks. Some shows might make better use of their aliens than others (witness the balletic, almost Shakespearean interplay of G’Kar and Londo Mollari in Babylon 5) but that doesn’t mean their humans are much cop. Alien characters are tokenism in the worst possible way. They present the moral superiority of mankind. Actually, no, they present the superiority of post-modern, American, middle-class values, a tedious, humourless, bland existence. This sheer niceness might seem an irony for shows set aboard warships, but the flying living rooms of the future demand their conformity just as the armed forces of today do, albeit of a different kind. When captain Picard says to Worf, “Well done Worf, today you behaved like a human”, he is really saying “Well done Worf, today you behaved like an American.” Because a certain kind of American would like to believe that even in space, everyone wants be that certain kind of American, no matter how nobbly their foreheads. Like the Iraqis and the Taliban, the Klingons just don’t know it yet.

It’s probable now that this kind of science fiction has run its course. It is a product of the 90s, the ensemble show of nice but dull types, just as the 80s was ruled by lone, arrogant heroes with nought but a natty gimmick and a dollop of smarm between them and cancellation. (The Stargate franchise forms a seemingly endless rump to the exploratory space ensemble. In SG, the devolution of humanity has gone as far as it can, the people reduced to a band of indistinguishable nerds, barely competent to do their jobs, whose only real qualifications seem to be either a gruff voice or the ability to make bad jokes at inappropriate moments. Science fiction has always struggled on the seesaw between idea and adventure for all, of course, but at least the day before yesterday’s heroes had squarer jaws.  In Stargate, aliens have become even more infantilised, and the humans are seen through a perpetual child’s eyes.)

Thanks then, to the likes of Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Ensembles have, thankfully, changed. The rubber-nosed cypher has gone out of fashion.

But interestingly, the Spock archetype has never gone away. The balancing act between rationality and emotion (as opposed to acceptable and unacceptable emotiveness, which is what the alien is there for) has been taken up by the robot or AI. Bladerunner‘s Replicants and Data started this trend. The likes of the Holosuite Doctor and Romy took it up. These are the characters that can ask unflinchingly ‘Tell me of this human thing called love’. Their artificiality might ask us ‘What is personhood?’ too, for this is what our notions of ‘progress’ demands of us in the 21st Century, but when Arnie says, at the close of Terminator 2 “Now I understand why you cry”, he was speaking from the same therapy group as Spock. The Cylons, Cameron and others keep this debate alive to this very day. In real life aliens are as far away as ever, but machines become cleverer year by year, so this important theme is likely to remain central to SF for some time.

Hey, and it is! In my book! It was around the time I wrote this that I was writing Reality 36.

Life online

Live out your fantasies in a persistent online world! The future’s here, right, um no, not really, says Guy Haley. Or rather, so said Guy Haley, in 2009, not long before Death Ray died its death. There’s a lot of Virtual Reality in my books Reality 36 and Omega Point. The games of the future look great in my head, dangerously so. Here’s why I don’t like today’s version of VR: The MMORG (or whatever unwieldy acronym the damn things are going under these days). From Death Ray 19.

There are 11 million people registered to play World of Warcraft right now. Actually, seeing as you are reading this some time after I wrote it, it’s probably more. And World of Warcraft is just one of several games of the fantasy RPG type, and that is just one type of several persistent world games. 11 million people, folks, that’s a lot of dudes spending their free time pretending to be Elves.

I find the idea of massively multi-player online roleplaying games intriguing. Stepping into an artificial world is, after all, a staple of post-microchip SF, whether it’s the cyberspaces frequented by hackers in 80s cyberpunk or the full-scale replacement reality of The Matrix. I’ve tried a great many of these games: Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, City of Heroes, Eve: Online, a couple of obscure Japanese titles that I can’t even remember the names of and, of course, the obligatory stint on World of Warcraft. I have always, always come away slightly dazed and very disappointed.

My WoW experience with a gnome named Gukguk was the longest, at three solid months of 2005. I put in two hours or more of mouse clicking nearly every day. I played and I played, my will fixed on securing Gukguk one of the riding beasts that only become available to characters at level 50 and above. The day finally came – hours of play to reach the required level, hours more to scrape together the gold I needed to buy it – when I virtually ran into the virtual blacksmiths and handed over my  virtual cash, pressing the icon to summon my coveted ‘Mechanostrider’ (a mechanical ostrich, would you credit) and, and… discovered it allowed my gnome to move just ever so slightly faster than before. It was, in all truth, a bit shit. So shit, in fact, it was almost as disappointing as my first intimate dalliance with a lady.

I gave sex another go, but not WoW. There were many other things that made me quit, but that was the point of no return. I stopped paying my £8 monthly subscription shortly after. Gukguk went into the cryogenic suspension that is the fate of all abandoned characters. 18 months later he would have been humanely destroyed, like an unwanted dog, only nothing real actually had to die.

I love games. I love playing with other people. But MMORGs, to use their horrible acronym, aren’t really games, they’re a weird synthesis of game and theme park. Like a fairground ride, there is a sense of danger but no real peril, but kind of even less gripping – the adventure is at one further remove still : it’s not you who is not in any real danger, but your non-existent character who is not in any real danger.

In an MMORG, nothing ever changes. No one is beaten or loses. None of your actions have any effect on the world around you. Your character cannot die. His heroic efforts in the Blackspire Dungeons or Tortage have no real effect, for the game is reset for the next band of heroes, who wait patiently in line behind you. The guy whose boxes you helped shift for some minor quest reward will be there for all time, waiting to dole out the quest to someone else. Pity him, for his task will remain forever unaccomplished no matter how many Dutch teenagers stop to help, like some cartoonish Sisyphus he is digitally damned.

And everyone in an MMORG is a hero. There are no peasants, no people delivering shoes, just thousands of improbably named avatars running from one quest giver to another. Nowhere does this appear more ridiculous than in City of Heroes, an online metropolis full of spandex clad vigilantes and victims and nought else. As every hero has to be heroic, MMORGs  are a place where everyone must have prizes, and everyone does.

Those that cite the socialising element of MMORGs are overplaying it – It’s harder than you think to find groups to tackle big adventures. To pwn or be pwned, that is the question with these games. They are full of annoying jargon, LEET speak, patronising wankers, and emotionally incontinent yoof who are desperate to prove themselves better than you because they have a slightly superior pair of pantaloons. So much so, a lot of players play alone. MMORGs were despairingly referred to as “Massively Single Player Online Roleplaying Games” by the designers of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, who put a lot of time and effort to come up with ways to make people play together. But even the nice guys online (of which there are a great, great many) are totally focussed on gaining yet more non-existent items. It’s materialism gone mad – Immaterialism, if you like, the final great folly of consumerist culture (um, the despoilation of Planet Earth aside).

There are games that are more ‘realistic’, but conversely greater realism doesn’t work either. Eve: online has a genuinely persistent world, where the economy is player generated, everything is made by another gamer. But that means for every starship captain and corporate mogul, there are 10,000 schmucks mining asteroids in real time. Eve is the wrong side of real. When I quit the game, I was asked to fill in a form to say why: “If I want a dull job, I can get one in real life,” was my perhaps unhelpful comment. Seriously, I used to sit there and read a book while my spaceship did its ore-sucking thing.

They do, however, have real effects. Second Life (now there’s a pointless game! Go into an unreal city and open a shoe shop, woohoo!) suffered a banking collapse that spookily presaged the recent financial crisis in the real world, and people lost real money. There have been murders over online incidents (Perhaps that is to say that there is real peril, but no-one wants to get murdered over a game, so don’t be facetious). Relationships can crack under the strain of a serious online habit.  People have died after playing for 24 hours straight. Gamers can become addicted. Schoolwork can suffer.

I can almost see the appeal. World of Warcraft provided a release for me from some fairly stressful times at work. It is always there, always on. You can be sure of finding someone to talk to, however facile your conversation may be. The clicking of buttons and the resultant slaying of monsters is hypnotically restful. Some of the spectacular landscapes and monsters can be breathtaking. If you are really lucky, you might make a good friend. The allure of them is such that I will keep trying them, but I’ll also probably keep on abandoning them after a few weeks, because not one has proven a substitute for engaging in real activity: seeing a friend, kissing a pretty girl, playing some sport… Until the day you can step into an online world so realistic you can feel the wind on your face, then I will probably remain disappointed. And if such a game were to be invented, it would probably be so addictive it would have to be banned. You heard it here first.

A letter from [my old] editor

Matt Bielby is the man who set up SFX, and who launched Death Ray. I worked with him only on the latter, but have known him for years. He’s got a looooong CV in the magazine industry. Google him.

He read Reality 36, and seeing as he’s a prolific wordsmith, he sent me a critique of it (he wrote it while becalmed on a sailing boat, would you believe). I emailed him back a set of responses, as you do.

Some of this reveals some of my thinking on writing the book, and a little bit of the backstory to the universe so I thought I’d share. So here goes. My bits are in bold. I figured I’d just reproduce it as it was in the correspondence, although I’ve removed some of the more spoilery stuff, and tidied up some of my points. However, please bear in mind that this still contains several spoilers for Reality 36. Read it at your own peril. It’s all very honest, too, so if you’re a writer, or are interested in the writing process, it might be useful to you.

All fair comment mate, no worries there.I think part of my problem is that I have to write so fast, my pay is quite low as I’m new, so I can’t afford to spend 18 months making each book perfect. On the other hand, some of the stuff you mention is resolved in the book. Other parts of it are not covered as I was trying to achieve two things; one, to keep info-dumping down to a minimum and the other, to throw the reader into the deep end. The analogy I always use is that you go to observe a meeting of say, social workers or physicists – whatever – they have their jargon, and they don’t tone it down for you. You have to catch up. Ultimately, I hoped the pace would cover over the cracks, and from what you say, I think I almost pulled it off!

Thanks for the compliments. And don’t concern yourself over my replies, I really do find all this useful, and I do not feel in any way defensive (apologies if it comes across that way).

Here are those notes, as promised — tidied up a bit, of fairly epic length (as ever!) and hopefully interesting and/or useful. (Or, at least, not annoying.)

Cheers! M

First, and most important, thing to say is that I liked it, really liked it. More than any of the short fiction of yours that I’ve seen, and certainly more than the vast majority of debut novels I’ve read. You deftly sidestepped most of the obvious obstacles and kept me distracted from whatever (relatively minor) flaws there are by fast pace, engaging characters and a seemingly endless run of invention.

Inevitably, the following seems to contain more negatives than positives, but that is the way with these things: if I haven’t mentioned them, assume that I think they work!

Some general points

I wasn’t bored. Not once, not even for a page. For me that’s huge: countless classics have their dull bits, loads of bestsellers have their clever plots near-ruined by clunky prose. But Reality 36 was a smooth, entertaining read. I didn’t just finish it because I know you or because I had to for a review; I raced through it because I was having a genuinely good time.

The prose throughout was solid, sometimes very good, though some bits worked for me better than others. (Details follow.) Way better than in much science fiction, certainly.

Characters were almost universally engaging, distinctive and well drawn, if often rather simple. (I’ll get onto what I think I mean by that.) Even more minor characters, like Chures, are very well done.

I like the general style – things like your invisible(ish) narrator, single-POV-character-per-chapter choices, and the fact that once the story starts to move faster you have little Dan Brown-style cliffhangers at the end of most chapters. The balance of humour with action, character stuff with exposition, etc. seems sound.

The world-building, as has been much commented on, is excellent: confident-sounding and convincing. We get tons of info, and while for whole chunks of the book it seems hardly a paragraph goes by without some new future fact being slipped in, it never feels like we’re swamped or bludgeoned by it. Top stuff.

I like the way you follow modern scientific speculative thinking most of the time, then just ignore what currently appears likely to make things more fun when it suits you: flying cars, say, are probably quite unlikely, but the book’s more fun with them, so they stay.

You’re quite right there, but I think the flying cars fall between two stools – they’re not very likely, but not completely unlikely. The idea in the book is that new carbon composites and high-powered hydrogen fuel cells overcome the two main obstacles to contemporary flying cars – weight, and power source. They’re very much based on this: http://www.moller.com/

Some things I particularly liked

Your well-handled action sequences, especially the one with Otto in the diner (except for Otto’s comment on sniper movement; as I understand it, real-world snipers mostly stay put, or move incredibly slowly, for fear of being spotted), and the one with Richards and Big Daddy.

The sniper in this is a [SPOILER!], shooting at a cyborg. Otto would have been able to see him if he stayed put in this case, it’s the future, so things have changed.

The sidekicks, chiefly Chloe and Tarquinius. But especially Chloe. (She was especially cute on p262: “’No,’ she said in a small voice.”)

As I said, the constant invention: you’ve always got some new future concept to pull out of the bag, be it huge things like the Great Firewall of China, or the way more minor stuff Quifang sees on his trip to London.

You’ve plenty of good twists.

Some things I wasn’t sure about at first, and grew to like

Jag and his world: I was worried we were going to get loads of silly names, a plodding quest etc and was rather glad when we didn’t.

Otto. I was worried he might come across as something of a stock character – the gruff, heavy-drinking ex-grunt – and though that is there, I ended up rather liking him.

I tried to keep the characters simple, archetypes, hopefully without them being cliché. I figured with such a dense world going on, to have massively complicated character types would have undermined my aim of writing a fast-paced adventure.

I find many genre books I read go for kitchen-sink characters (as in they describe everything but) and they all end up seeming the same. It’s better to let the reader fill them in with their imagination. Simplicity is key. On saying that, there are depths to them, but they are hidden for the time being!

The names, like Reality 36 and Omega Point, which initially sounded too meaningless and SF-generic, have actually grown on me. (I’m less certain about the chapter names, which don’t seem to follow any set rule: sometimes the name of the POV character, sometimes of another character they meet, sometimes of a place, sometimes repeated, sometimes a first name and sometimes a surname, sometimes a more general description of the chapter’s content, sometimes the same thing said in different ways: The 36th Realm vs Reality 36, etc.)

Chapter names aren’t that important. I just wanted something short and punchy for each that helped set the scene.

Some things I’m still not sure about

Hughie and Richards together: I’m just not certain I ever quite reconciled their more buffoonish dressing-up-box character qualities with the hugely powerful and important supercomputer serious business that must be ticking over out of sight.

With this, I was trying to make them human, without being human. The thing with the Fives is that they try quite hard to be human, but they are not really. The rules governing my AI are quite complex, and I didn’t want to bang on about it and swamp the narrative. I thought it best to present them as characters, no matter how… Odd. If there are more books, more of all this stuff will be revealed.

The whole AI hierarchy thing: did they really build over 1,000 Fives in a single year, from scratch, and then give them all important jobs, which they could then fuck up right royally, within the same year? 2104 seems awfully busy! And how come a Class Two AI (like the one Quaid says he has just to sail his boat) seem so much more stupid than, say, Chloe, who is only a near-I?

Two things here. First, the Fives. The Five Crisis is a major part of my backstory, which I intend to fill in over time (there’s a bit about it in Champion of Mars, which is set in the same universe). They weren’t all given important jobs –Richards was bought to be a digital archive retrieval machine (there’s more on this in ‘The Nemesis Worm’). All AI in the universe were bought (before emancipation), like Windows is now – in fact, maybe best to think of them as smart operating systems or system administration computers? You know, years of development, then a roll-out, they were products. The Fives went crazy for reasons that will eventually be revealed.

They weren’t all running the European security services – and in fact the ones that remain and are in powerful roles have worked their way into those positions (Hughie says as much).

The Fives have a fundamentally different architecture to those that came beforehand. The ones that came after share the same underlying structure as the Fives, but were deliberately limited. This is also alluded to.

Chloe is an exception to the rule dividing Near-I and AI. She’s been heavily tinkered with, by someone who is something of an AI genius. Like the Fives, Sixes and Sevens (and unlike the Ones to Fours), she has evolved elements to her capabilities and personality. The more indivualistic Threes and Fours – like Lincolnshire Flats and Cybele (who’s she? Find out soon) also use heuristics and progressive mental evolution in how they live and adapt, not this is not how they were built. That’s all I’ll say on the matter for now!

The Reality Realms: if all they are is big, futuristic computer game world like WoW or whatever, why are they so powerful and important? I get that they can’t be switched off because of all the ‘life’ within them, but surely anyone rich enough (like, I assume, k52) could just build new ones that are as good if they wanted, instead of trying to usurp existing ones? And why didn’t Jag, if he’s so powerful, send a more obvious, can’t-be-ignored warning out of R36 that it’s all going badly wrong?

The Realms represent a massive slice of Grid real estate, even though their hardware is somewhat outdated. They are also entirely isolated, so k52 could do his stuff undetected.

Jag and Tarquinius are not all that powerful. They are entirely part of their world.

To carry dialogue, I’m usually of the belief that you should nine-times-out-of-ten (at least!) only use ‘said’, and very rarely with a qualifier: don’t get me wrong, R36 isn’t bad in this regard, but there was still a little too much sighing/crying/muttering/gasping etc going on in places, and too much ‘he said disappointedly/sharply/enticingly/unsurely’ etc too.

Yeah, maybe. I can find it a bit bland without any. En masse they help build character — if you’re careful. I’m still finding my way with this. I hate it when people overuse them myself, or have one stock phrase they use over and again in this circumstance (“He gave her an ‘Oh please!’ look”).  Which way do I turn? Sookie Stackhouse, or Cormac McCarthy? : )

Just occasionally, I thought the almost 2000AD-like parodies of modern-day stuff got a little heavy-handed, though they were perhaps worth it for the gag: Otto’s thoughts on Americans and their candy, the continued existence of Starbucks, Fanta and Germoline, Toyota renaming itself Toyata (unless a typo), etc…

Toyata is a typo. It’s actually not supposed to be a 200AD type parody. Some of this stuff is in there because it’s useful shorthand for the reader. Some of it because brands can last for a long time. (Although we all remember the TWA logos on 1970s ‘future’ spaceships, eh?)

Some of it is because one of the underlying (very lightly touched on and hardly there at all) themes is that I reckon an information culture, where everything is to hand, can stagnate. Look at kids now, they listen to music of all kinds. When I was a boy it was what was hot now, and everything else was old and past it. Companies trade off nostalgia. Brand identity is so important now, and I don’t think this will change.

We could, I reckon, be grinding to a halt in some respects, maybe even losing our artistic vitality. I touch on this when Otto is looking at the diner, which is a pastiche of a pastiche of the 1950s. Or it could all be bollocks.

Occasionally information was either hidden or only revealed very late: unless I missed it (which I might have done), we don’t discover Veronique is black until way, way into the book (p143, I think);

I agree. That’s a bit dumb.

USNA takes an awfully long time to be explained;

United States of North America— that’s a deliberate deep-ender.

we never discover why Richards has called himself Richards, etc.

I will reveal this eventually. In the real world, he’s named after a know-it-all friend I have, who is called Richard.

Now I like the drip-feed of info, but it’s annoying to have to reboot the visual you’ve got of someone half way through. (It’s like watching Star Trek in black-and-white as a kid: I thought all their shirts were blue, because I’d seen a colour photo of Spock in a blue shirt, then when we got a colour TV i was really annoyed that I’d been imagining it all wrong!)

There is no wrong Matt, it’s your imagination!

I occasionally got confused about things: is Chloe actually her phone, or a near-I program that lives on her phone but could live elsewhere too, or what?

She’s a programme. She exists mostly on the Grid, with a large part of her personality kept inside Valdaire’s phone. She’s actually illegal– an AI that powerful should have a registered base unit. Cloud existence for AI is not permitted. But she’s a near-I, so that’s alright then. (Valdaire’ll get busted for this, one of these days).

Can Chloe copy herself (as the Fives are not allowed to do, seemingly) elsewhere?

They ALL can, but they’re not allowed to. Although it wouldn’t occur to a baseline near-I to do so, or to a One or Two, for that matter.

Similarly, what exactly is Genie’s status?

This will be revealed later. This is deliberate on my part. There’s a short story here. The most important thing is that she’s the new girl.

And how much multi-tasking can a Five do: a lot of the time they seem to be only in one ‘place’ at a time, but surely the whole point of having an AI do Hughie’s job is that they can handle a million different cases etc all at once? Things like this may have been explained, but perhaps not clearly enough for a doofus like me, or that info got swamped in all the other explanations of near-future things.

I didn’t really explain it on purpose. But they’re just like really smart people, they’re not massively awesome supercomputers in a godlike SF over-noggin, Mekon’s-pocket-calculator sense. They can be aware of a lot. They can work on a fair few things at once. But look at the way they work: Hughie is an overseer, really –he doesn’t work on those cases he mentions himself. Richards can assimilate lots of information, but to really use their superior brains, they have to concentrate on one thing, just like us. They theoretically can split their consciousnesses down into subminds, or copy themselves, but that is illegal. The price of freedom is to live as we do.

One underlying theme here (these themes are very minor) is that the Fives are almost, almost, like a new pantheon of gods — capricious, flawed, human, but inhuman. Richards is a [SPOILER] type, a friend of man.

The repetition of elements, and air of manipulation, in having Otto twice come across Bad Men so evil they have a truck full of poor little orphans they plan to do nasty things to.

Yeah. Guilty. My bad. Although the kids in the jungle were the families of the rebels. I find that writers do get trapped in thematic cul-de-sacs (and linguistic, character and whatever else – the limits of one human mind are not so great. Indeed, I made the characters simple as by complicating them, I’d just run into the walls bounding my own intellect) and I’m no exception.

p145. Jagedith ‘wobbled his head’. Really? Like in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum?

Jagadith was programmed by an Indian. He was based on my experiences of actual Indians in actual India. They really do do that. It’s a cultural thing.

p167 Quaid’s shock that he had sex with a robot. Surely as common as sneezing for a guy like him?

No! Fucking a robot!? He’s a genetically engineered aristo, way below him. Well, maybe not, the shock was because he didn’t notice. The little brain was in charge there. I think he was embarrassed.

Why can’t Jag etc just ‘teleport’ about the R36 game world instead of traveling physically? They could easily be coded that way, and it would make them much better at their job, surely?

Meh. Who knows? My reckoning is that once he manifested from wherever he was before he was (mostly) bound by the rules of that reality. But what do I know? I’m not an expert on the Reality Realms. Ask Veronique.

I got a bit confused about exactly what was going on, why or how ‘matter’ from Reality 36 was being stolen to build Reality 37, as described on p306 and elsewhere, or exactly what is going on in a couple of sequences, like the top half of p308.

It’s processing space, not matter per se. A lot of the weirdness can be explained by the computers that run these worlds trying to visualise things like file swaps or overwriting in a visual way that makes sense to those observing it, in the context of where they are observing it from. It’s all quantum : )

Some things to think about

Did the plot actually make sense? I’m not sure. Reality 36 is a bit like a Raymond Chandler or something in that it seems to hang together at the time, and then afterwards you can’t remember exactly who did what to who and why. Certainly, did having all these super-high-end, presumably super-expensive robot doubles of the famous and easily-spotted Quifang running around blowing themselves up and getting killed in unlikely places really help anyone achieve anything they couldn’t have done in a much simpler, easier way? Not sure.

Bit late to think about that surely! Qifang’s face is not that recognisable, really. The people of the 22nd century are even more self-obsessed than we are, and overly reliant on technology. But yeah, maybe the plot is not entirely believable. Or maybe it’s too complicated, I thought this more than once, but it’s that way because a) It’s an entertainment, and b) lots of things in real life don’t make sense, so why should they in fiction? I am aiming for a ‘Whole Cloth World’. (See the interviews on my blog for what I mean by this). Not ‘Tied up In Bows’.

Does the book read too much like a particularly sophisticated YA novel, with only the odd, slightly-uncomfortable moment of true adult-ness creeping in? Of course, no characters are kids here, and there’s no teen angst, but I think here’s what I mean: nobody comes across like a modern-day adult in that there’s no sex (or romance), at all, and nobody has anything resembling money worries, job worries, relationship worries, family worries, or any of that. Certainly, because of this lack of grit (except in the action sequences, natch) those moments where the adult world was more front-and-centre jumped out at me: when the narrator, up until now largely dispassionate, seems to weigh in calling Hughie a cock on p119 and throughout that chapter; when hundreds of people were killed in a bomb; when Veronique pulls the catheter out. (The fact that I was occasionally reminded of writers like Philip Pullman – Chloe, Bartolomeo etc as daemons, Veronique as Mary Malone, the Grid and the Reality Realms as the various parallel worlds – heightened the YA-with-adult-bits impression, perhaps.)

I don’t think so. Should I put sex and romance in it, just for the sake of it? I didn’t deliberately avoid them. They will feature in later books, they just weren’t part of this story. Indeed, Otto’s relationship with his wife, and her death, is a major strand of Omega Point. And there is some real horror in there too. Poverty and environmental destruction and human suffering will be a major part of this series. If it makes it to a series.

Finally (and perhaps only for me) two big weak points (and one minor weak point)

The minor one

It seems to me you constantly ask commas to do the job of full stops, semi-colons, colons, brackets or dashes: you’ll have a sentence, like this one you’re reading now, with two distinct elements to it, and all you’ll use to separate them is a comma.

Initially, I was trying to mimic the way people speak –in broken sentences, repetitively, false starts, etc. I dropped this, but the punctuation, at least in the dialogue, reflects that/ is a remnant of it. You are right, though/

The bigger ones

I didn’t always love the dialogue: it gave information, it established character, it was sometimes (even often) very good fun, but it didn’t always read to me as something someone would actually say.Much of the tough-guy dialogue in Chapter 5 is an example, especially elements like Otto’s hugely long speech on p103-104. Quifang’s ranting in R36 is another.

There is an element of the monologue here that I need to stamp on, it’s all to do with developing as a writer.

In the Hughie/Richards talks Hughie initially appears as, yes, as much of a cock as advertised (though I ended up being rather fond of him)…

Well, that worked!

…but the way Richards talks defines him as, at least, a bit of a dick too. (Similarly when he starts doing an annoying American accent around p204.)

And that worked too! He’s not going to say “Hughie’s a cock, but hey, I’m a cock too,” is he? Of course he’s a dick! I mention how Otto is annoyed by him, yes? It’s supposed to be, um, complexity. EVERYONE can be a dick. And somethimes, when a dick calls someone is a cock, the cock is not a cock at all. Methinks you want it a little too clearly laid out for you.

Quaid says things like ‘Goddamn!’ all the time, which seems a bit broad; similarly with the garage guy on p240, etc.

Quaid is a cliche made flesh –my joke at what real DNA tinkered rich bastards would be like. A lot of what you say is simply this: I tried to mimic real speech (see above). It doesn’t work, so I settled on a bunch of  ‘signifier’s’ to set apart each character from one another, which also helps keep them simple and aids the engagement of the reader’s imagination too. It’s a bit unsubtle, but it kind of works. I am sure I will get better at this. I hope.

(All this said, though – and weirdly – I quite liked the outrageous French accent around p247, so what do I know?)

The structure is a bit odd. In classic detective fiction, the hero gets the initial case – which then goes all twisty and turny, of course – in the first chapter or so; here we have to wait until page 129, the meeting with Hughie, for the set-up stuff to be over and the real plot to actually start. Before that we’ve had Otto at war and Otto’s stuff with Launcey, all with good bits but more like stand-alone short stories than integral parts of this tale, plus chapters introducing Jag and R36, Veronique, etc.

One of my worries was that the intro  is maybe too long, and maybe the book is too complicated. On the other hand, life is messy and I wanted Reality 36 to reflect life in a bunch of ways, which is why I think it works, even sometimes when it should not! I also plan to have a James Bond style pre-credits adventure to each book, which the Launcey adventure here kind of it, but we’ll see.

Then there’s the fact that this looks like a stand-alone novel, but is actually part 1 of 2, already much commented on. And the fact that the big bad (we assume), k52, doesn’t even appear, like Blofeld in the early Bond films – but more so, as we don’t even see his hands! Don’t get me wrong: none of this breaks the book by any means. But I do think it could have been better.

k52 is an enigma. Deal with it : ) I do wrap the Qifang part of the case up. I would have liked to have finished it off in one volume but, well, look at it as the two-part season opener (buy the book so there are more!)

Finally, though the book’s pretty ‘clean’, here are some typos and other minor mistakes I spotted, perhaps to be corrected for subsequent printings(!):

[I reproduce only some here, as most are simply technical errors; but there are a few that offer some insight into the writing process].

p314 Jag says R36 is the most violent of all the lands, but where’s the evidence? It seems quite benign.

They’re in the middle of nowhere, that’s why.

p314: maths doesn’t work – says one realm dies to save 35, but 4 are destroyed already, so it actually dies to save 31.

Well done. Originally, there were 40 Realms, but we changed it because it was too close to Douglas Adams’ ’42′. This is a hangover from that. We did spot it, but too late.

p336 Hughie’s based in Geneva? I may have got this wrong (in fact, I think I probably have), but I’m sure earlier on it was suggested he was based in New London. (He certainly comes across as English, with his country garden/English summer/baking cakes fixations, etc. What language do they speak in this new Europe? It’s never mentioned.)

He’s based in Geneva, as is mentioned. He comes across as English because it suited my caprice, and he may well have been an ‘English’ Five to start with. The languages of Europe are as they are now (well, the same, but different, as language shifts), but as noted in ‘The Nemesis Worm’, the official language of the EU in the 22nd century is Neo-Latin. Which is like a less shit Esperanto.

p352 Richards’ survival is a tiny bit of a cheat: like in an old Flash Gordon serial, it looked like he was shot dead/blown up/fell out of a space ship, but next week it turns out it was only a flesh wound, or he jumped clear at the last minute.

It’s an action story… He did nearly die! Come on Bielby!

p363 (and elsewhere, especially Chap.1) ‘anomalous jungle’: as physical rules would not seem to apply in a game world, why all this fuss about a jungle that couldn’t exist in the real world? And why would a game character care? So what?

Each Reality Realm is ‘fixed’, its laws of physics and so forth determining how it should be. Physical rules apply very much in the cordoned off RRRW’s. Tarq and Jag are NOT game characters, but security programmes.

Phew! And that’s it. Like I say, an exceptional start.

And thanks to Matt for that too! This kind of thing is a great help to writers. As one day I will say, when I get round to my ‘how I write post’, “Always listen to criticism”. And I mean ALWAYS. You don’t have to agree with all or indeed any of it, but great things can come of it, and at least listening says you’ve got the right attitude.

Richards and Klein Art

Joseph, a very old friend of mine read Reality 36 recently, and he was inspired to create these pieces of 3D art. I thought I’d put them up here.  If anyone else out there fancies creating a Richards and Klein themed picture, then do have a go and talk to me here on the comments board, I’ll put them up too. You can check out Joe’s Gallery here.

Richards and his double. 'The Nemesis Worm'.

Richards surfs the Grid.