Broadcast

 

Heard this on Lauren Laverne's Six Music show yesterday. Wow, it's amazing, they're my new favorite band.

Wait ... it came out in ....2000? How is that even possible? I have NEVER heard this before.

And the singer Trish Keenan passed away in 2011, after contracting H1N1 swine flu? 

Sometimes the world just doesn't seem fair.

That was July, that was

 

Sharing a laugh with Peter while on stage. Photo by Thorsten Wulff.

I had a busy, productive July. I got the month off to a promising start by joining Peter F Hamilton in Berlin, where we attended Metropol Con 26, the European SF convention. Our visit was in conjunction with our friends from the Otherland Bookstore, where Peter and I had both done successful and enjoyable events in the past, although not together. Peter and I flew in on separate flights and met up at the Moxy Hotel, just one S-Bahn stop down the line from the excellent event venue at the silent green Kulturquartier, a converted former crematorium. It sounds unpromising but you couldn't ask for a better event space, and everyone there looked to be having a very good time. 

Signing with Peter. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was great to meet you all.

We certainly enjoyed ourselves, with some excellent beers and meals in the evening, and Peter and I also found time to visit the Berlin Technical Museum:

 

I think the C-47/DC-3/Dakota might be one of my favorite aircraft types - but you'd know that if you've read one of my earlier novels. There's just something so totally right about them.

And credit to Peter for spotting this before I did: it's a piece of circa-1800 plateway from, of all places, Merthyr Tydfil, just up the road from where I live in Wales. Fantastic!

I've always been impressed with Berlin as a beautiful, liveable city, spacious and airy, with wonderful public transport and great amenities, and this third visit did nothing to change my opinion. Many thanks to Wulf and friends from Otherland, and to the organisers of Metropol Con; I think it was a great success, and thanks also to my good friend Peter for his usual great company. I'd also like to thank photographer Thorsten Wulff for the beautiful prints he gave me of Bowie and Patti Smith, truly wonderful.

Beers with Wulf. That stuff - a dark lager - was bloody lethal, especially as I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol since the start of May.

Your new favorite band photo, according to Wulf. Photo by Thorsten Wulff.

Upon returning from Berlin I had a short week back in Wales, in the middle of this blistering continuing heatwave, during which I just about managed to continue work on the new book. The second round of edits for MERLIN'S WAY had in fact come in just before I left, but rather than work on them in a fragmented fashion, I opted to hold fire until I'd got back from my second big trip of the month, this time to Spain. You need to be in a certain mindset to focus on edits, in my experience, and it's best done in an uninterrupted workflow.

The Spanish trip was built around attending Celsius, the festival of horror, fantasy and SF in Aviles, northern Spain. The brilliant writer Ian Watson had very kindly invited me to come along in 2020, but, because of Covid, and my mother's ill health, I had to decline. Ian had re-invited me for 2026, and I was more than happy to accept. Ian passed away earlier this year, but his partner, Cristina, was determined that Celsius should proceed. I cannot thank Cristina enough for her warmth, enthusiasm and helpfulness during what must have been an incredibly trying period, but I can only hope that the evident success of the festival offered some small reward for the effort invested. My wife travelled with me and we were very well looked after, and made extremely welcome by all present. Aviles is a wonderful location for the festival - it was actually cooler and rainier than Wales while we were there, which was no bad thing - and I know many writers make a point of returning. It's a very chilled affair for the attendees, and although the events tend to run well into the night, there's no stress and always the promise of some good wine and tapas to reward one's sterling efforts. I was delighted, incidentally, to find out that another Ian, Ian McDonald, was also attending. He's one of those who've made repeat visits, and it was lovely to catch up with him over wine and grub. 

I have to pinch myself sometimes, getting to hang out with the likes of Ian, after first discovering his stories thirty five years ago, when we were both a lot, lot younger, and very much closer to the beginnings of our careers than the ends. I'd sold a couple of stories to Interzone, but they'd not yet published them, when in early 1990 I came across Ian's first short story collection, "Empire Dreams", in the books section of Grace Brothers department store. No, not the fictional Grace Brothers from "Are you Being Served", but the actual one that used to exist in Sydney and maybe elsewhere. Anyway, I read Ian's stories with amazement and envy, blown away by his use of language and seemingly effortless ease with all the gnarly tropes of SF, and it's a source of great delight to get to hang out with him all these years later. I also enjoyed meeting, among others, and in no particular order, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jo Walton, Ursula Vernon, Becky Chambers (we'd said hello in Berlin) and Wole Talabi, who gave an excellent interview full of interesting insights on AI. Anyway, Celsius was great! My wife and I flew in and out of Bilbao, where we've got family, but even the five hour bus ride to Aviles and back went smoothly.

Once I was back and settled in Wales, I cracked on with the delayed edits for Merlin. Those went pretty smoothly and the ms is now back with my editor, who reports that the changes I sent back all look good. Barring any further queries, therefore, the book's next port of call will be typesetting, after which it will go out for proofing. That's about the last stage at which any alterations can be made, and they ought to be small ones by then, after which the book will move to the printers, ready for publication early next year. And I, meanwhile, am now back working on the next one, which has the working title THE DREAM FARMS. We'll see if that sticks.

Thanks!

 Thank you to all who braved the heat to meet me at Cowbridge Library, it was lovely to see you all and I could have chatted for hours. Thanks also to Phil and Charlotte at the library for a most enjoyable event.

And, just because I heard it on the radio in the car on the drive down, this rather gorgeous piece of new music from PJ Harvey, which I believe was commissioned by Brian Cox!

Splendid.

Cowbridge library event on Friday 26th June

 I'm a little late posting this, but if you're in the Cowbridge area this Friday afternoon, I'll be doing a talk and Q&A at the library:

There'll be another South Wales library event a bit later in the year, but in the meantime, I look forward to seeing people in Cowbridge.

I knew Brexit would be a disaster and I was right.

 What I posted in June 2016, on the eve of the Brexit referendum:

Why I'm for the UK remaining in the EU

In a very short while the UK will be holding a referendum on the country's continued membership of the EU. At the moment, judged on the polls (which are of course often inaccurate, as with the last general election), things seem to be heading the way of a vote to leave.

I think it would be a great shame were this to happen. As a young scientist, I benefitted tremendously from the freedom of movement allowed within the EU. I'm not talking about my time within the European Space Agency, which is a non-EU organisation, although that experience certainly helped frame my views on European cooperation and integration. But having left ESA in 1994, I was immediately able to take up a two year postdoctoral position at a Dutch university, and I did so with the minimum of hassle and paperwork. Once again I was immersed in a pan-European working environment which I found stimulating and encouraging.

After my postdoctoral position expired in 1996, I found myself unemployed. There were a handful of possible job opportunities back in the UK, but I had grown fond of the Netherlands, and my partner at the time, who later became my wife, had a full-time job. She too had benefitted from freedom of movement within the EU. Disinclined to leave Holland, therefore, I signed on for unemployment benefit from the Dutch state, while continuing to look for work opportunities within the area where we lived. I applied for one job in Delft, working on satellite monitoring of the Earth's atmosphere, but was not made an offer.

Luck eventually intervened, in that I saw an advert in Nature for a newly founded business in Haarlem, which would revolve around developing scientific software for astronomical applications. It seemed right up my street, almost literally so, in that Haarlem was only a short train ride from where we lived near Leiden. I applied for the job and was suitably astonished to learn that the driving force behind the business was an old colleague of mine - and a Welshman, like me, who had settled in the Netherlands. We met for an interview, which went well. While there was a strong prospect of working for the company in the future, though, there was still going to be a few more months of unemployment. I therefore continued to sign on, while going through the motions of looking for work. It was an odd, unsettling time, but - in hindsight - a blessing, because it enabled me to dust off the abandoned manuscript of Revelation Space and finally give it the polish it needed prior to submission. That was early 1997, and the book sold two years later. Those months of unemployment were therefore literally life-changing, and I owe them to the Dutch state and EU regulations on worker's rights.

Many of the arguments for and against membership of the EU seem to revolve around economics, which seems to me to be an extremely narrow metric. Even if we are better off out of the EU, which we probably won't be, so what? This is already a wealthy country, and leaving the EU won't mend the widening inequality between the very rich and almost everyone else. More than that, though, look at what would be lost. Friendship, commonality, freedom of movement, a sense that national boundaries are (and should be) evaporating. When many countries (including the Netherlands) moved to the Euro, it was a joy not to have to pack Guilders, Belgian francs, Deutschmarks, for a simple drive to visit to family in Germany a few hours away. The eradication of visible borders did not lead to a smearing out of regional cultures, but instead it made it much more easy to sample those cultures and gain a deeper sense of European history. I never stopped feeling that living in the EU was a thing to be proud of, and more than ever I am content to think of myself as European before British. I therefore hope that the Remain vote will win the day.

https://approachingpavonis.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-im-for-uk-remaining-in-eu.html#comment-form

I'm unreasonably excited about this.

 

Mercury Rev

 It's not a new album, it's been out since 2024, but it feels as if I've listened to little else since first picking up Mercury Rev's Born Horses. I've always loved Mercury Rev but even for a band that's rarely repeated itself, this record is an astonishing, mind-blowing excursion into strange new territories of the psyche. I can't compare it to anything else, and I don't think "masterpiece" is going too far. A genuine work of art, I think, which will endure.

Thanks Jonathan, Grasshopper, etc, you have made the world a slightly better place.