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.

May update

 Thanks for your patience with the lack of news over the last few months. All's been well, I've been busy with work and travel, but I'll offer a few highlights as a prelude to more regular updates as we go into the summer.

Once the Zurich stuff had died down (see last post), I got back into preparatory work on the new novel. I decided I wouldn't start any actual writing, though, until I'd completed the first round of edits on MERLIN'S WAY. February and March, then, were mostly taken up with planning, chapter outlines etc. It's not always the way I operate, but with a book of the kind I'm now writing, it's all but unavoidable.

It wasn't all hard work. In Mid February my wife and I travelled to Birmingham to see Carlos Acosta's ballet production Don Quixote, which was magnificent. On the way, we diverted via London where we went to the launch for our friend Paul McAuley's wonderful new novel LOSS PROTOCOL, which is certainly one of his best and most personal books, an affecting take on climate change, catastrophe and adaptation in a future Britain four or five decades from now. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

March came and went, as Marches tend to do. I hit my 60th birthday, but not being one much for milestones I kept it deliberately low-key, and was perfectly content with that. As the end of the month neared, edits came in on Merlin so I attended to those (not too bad) and then travelled back up to Birmingham for the Easter National SF Convention, held in a hotel at the NEC. I only went along as a punter, not taking part in any programming but it was nice to sit in on a few readings, panels etc and just generally catch up with friends old and new. I really love Birmingham and its environs; I've always felt comfortable there and it's a particular joy to have that connection affirmed by my link to the Birmingham SF Group (who I also visited during February's trip). I enjoyed Eastercon but I think it reinforced my feeling that one full day is about right for me, especially now that the dealer's room isn't all that great for just general book-buying. 

Peter Hamilton and I had an enjoyable meal the first night, then did the same thing again the second, along with the aforementioned Paul M, and Robin Kilsby from the Brum group.

Back in Wales, I finally made a real start on the new book. Not much to say on that one right now, other than that it's set mostly in Wales, in 2046, and it's structured around a police investigation. It's not noir, but it is very much science fiction.

Later in April I'd agreed to go to Bratislava to attend "VytahConf", a business-orientated space meeting. As the trip neared, I dropped work on the novel to prepare my talk for the closing session. My topic choice was handed to me on a plate, given the recent success of Artemis II. I'd just turned 60 and my whole life - thus far, at least - might be viewed as bookended by crewed Lunar missions. I don't remember any of the specific Apollo missions, but I do remember the fact of them happening, and my interest in space exploration was sufficiently activated that I do have clear recollections of Skylab. It's also one of the great thrills of my life to have met two Apollo astronauts (Jack Schmidt, and the now late Al Worden).

For my talk, I took an overview of those 60 years, looking at the timeline for orbital bases and lunar settlements that we might have had, contrasting visions from both NASA technical forecasts and contemporary science fiction, taking in such ambitious but perhaps unlikely ventures as Von Braun's proposal for a nuclear powered Mars landing by 1982. Although much remains unclear about Artemis III and beyond, the evident success of the Lunar fly-around, re-entry and splashdown was enough to be able to leave things on a reasonably optimistic note. I was captivated by the whole mission, in fact, and can't wait for the next chapter. 

Just a pity they cut the chorus:

Anyway, my hosts in Bratislava, Igor and Adam, made sure I was very well looked after. I loved my glimpse of this beautiful city, which marked my first visit to Slovakia. Indeed, other than a visit to Vienna about thirty years ago, I'm seriously untravelled in this whole part of Europe. I flew in to Vienna, by the way: it's only a relatively short, frictionless car ride across the barely-discernible border and between the two glittering, Danube-threaded cities.

Igor had arranged a Q&A and signing event at a great bookshop, Martinus, for the evening before the conference. The bookshop event was fantastic. Although I've not been translated into Slovakian, a number of my books have appeared in Czech language editions over the years. I signed many copies and chatted to some lovely people.

I don't take being translated at all lightly, but once you've received your contractual allocation of books, it can sometimes feel a bit abstract. Seeing these books, some of them new, but some of them also old and well-read, gave me a fantastic jolt of appreciation for the time and energy taken to put these translations into the world, and to the readers who have sought them out. I loved talking to everyone at Martinus (and the other readers I met at VytahConf, and in the pub later on) and hope my gratitude came across. There are so many legitimate reasons for having a writerly whinge lately: seeing your work scraped for AI training models, the hollowing out of publishing, the creeping death of the mass market paperback etc... but there are good times, too, reasons to keep grinding on. I came back from Bratislava absolutely stoked and threw myself back into the new book with renewed purpose.

There was stuff in May, and now I'm back on the book ... but I'm also taking a stab at a new novella, because I don't think I've been doing enough shorter fiction lately. It's a topic I touch upon in this interview with Jon from ScifiScavenger, which I did last month:

I very enjoyed chatting with Jon and if you've not checked out his channel, there's lots to dig into there. On the subject of Youtube channels, too, while it's not an interview, you might want to check out this discussion about Halcyon Years on Robin Kilsby's Bookspin channel:

Well that's about it for me. I'm off sick right now with a nasty chest infection so there's really nothing to be done except lounge around watching Star Trek re-runs. Could be worse, couldn't it?

Cheers and best wishes.

Al R